Wandering Island, Vol. 1 by Kenji Tsuruta

I think this is the first half of the story - there is one more volume out, and there's not a lot of plot in this one, so I find it hard to believe it runs much longer than that. Also, creator Kenji Tsuruta is only intermittently a maker of manga - he also works as a very in-demand SF illustrator - so his solo comics projects tend to be few and separated by years. Wikipedia says it ran in serialization in Japan from 2011-17, and the two collections were published in English - translated by Dana Lewis - in the fall of 2017, but does not say the story is complete or ended...but Wikipedia has also not been updated since then.

So this is definitely a beginning, but I can't say if there is an end. I guess I'll find out.

Wandering Island, Vol. 1 is a very Miyazaki-influenced story, about a young woman, Mikura Amelia, who runs a floatplane package-delivery service down the sparsely populated Izu and Ogasawara archipelagoes, which stretch from just south of Tokyo harbor down hundreds of miles to the south. As the book opens, her partner in the business, her grandfather Brian, has just died - from that point, it's a one-woman operation. (Unlike Miyazaki, there is not a plucky mechanic character - Mikura seemingly does all of the maintenance herself.)

There are a few other characters in Wandering Island, but they've very secondary - people Mikura interacts with, people she delivers packages too, her parents glimpsed quickly once or twice. The pages focus on Mikura herself, her cat Endeavour, her classic Fairey Swordfish plane, and the landscape around them. I didn't make a count, but at least half of the pages are wordless - this is a largely a story of emotion and image, driven by Mikura's grief over her grandfather.

In her grandfather's papers, Mikura discovers references to Electric Island, a mysterious place she's never heard of before, and a sealed package to deliver there. This island moves - how is never explained in this book - following the North Pacific Gyre, and coming close to Japan every three years.

Soon after her grandfather's death, she sees the island, and tries to land near it, but her plane crashes. She wakes up on a rescue vessel, some time later, the island nowhere in sight. Tsurata skips some amount of time - later in the book three years have passed, and Electric Island should be coming by again, but he doesn't give details of when those years passed, and Mikura looks no different at any point. Her plane also gets repaired somehow between scenes.

Mikura becomes obsessed with Electric Island - perhaps because her grandfather was, perhaps just because this is a book about an obsession, so one must develop. She neglects her business to the point where her electricity is cut off at least once - again, this is during the middle stretch of the book where three years pass somehow, so it's hard to tell if this was a week or a month or two years of mania and obsession.

At the end of this volume, Mikura has gotten some clues, and thinks she's mapped Electric Island's path this time. She sets out in her plane to find it again, to land and investigate, and, presumably, to deliver the package. That's where the volume ends - on her flight out to whatever.

Tsuraua puts Mikura in a bikini most of the time, which seemed reasonable for what seems to be mostly a hot climate and a woman mostly alone. I do see that his work has been criticized as male-gaze-y more than once - the skimpily clad girl and her cat seems to be a repeated motif - so it might not be quite as matter-of-fact as I gave it credit for. Other than that, he has a slightly scratchy line that I appreciate, and falls towards the detailed, even cluttered, side of manga, with lovingly-drawn airplanes and topographic maps and landscape seen from the sky.

This is a lovely book, but, as I said up top, it's not particularly plotty. It moves slowly, and most of what happens is in Mikura's head, as she pulls together clues and hints to figure out where this island has been and will be. The motifs may be Miyazakian - floatplanes, mysterious islands, plucky girls running their own businesses - but the tone is less so.