Captain Momo's Secret Base, Vol. 1 by Kenji Tsuruta

I discovered Kenji Tsuruta's work recently, with the atmospheric, Miyazaki-esque Wandering Island series - two volumes to date but incomplete - and thought I should see what else he'd done.

I think I went in the wrong direction. Wandering Island was a story with some fan-service elements - noticeable but forgivable. Tsuruta's more recent book, Captain Momo's Secret Base, Vol. 1, came out in 2024 in a Dana Lewis translation, and it's...

Well, not to be glib, but it's basically a fan-service with some story elements. This book is thin in multiple ways.

To start with the most obvious one: it collects a full-color intro and fourteen black-and-white chapters - there's less than a hundred and twenty pages of comics here. In some contexts, that's big - it's nearly as long as three French albums, for example. But, for a manga, it's on the short side.

The plot is similarly small: I've seen this described as "slice-of-life," which is not wrong, but is an odd way of describing a book about a single character all alone.

You see, it's about a thousand years in the future. Giant space freighters plow the spacelanes, carrying goods from one star to another. They are clearly traveling in the normal universe, and transit times are in the hundreds of days but not years, so my assumption is that they're relativistic and there's some time-dilation going on for the crews. Tsuruta says nothing about this, and implies that ship and their "ground" contacts are in the same frame of reference. So this may actually be a universe where the stars are substantially closer together, where there's One Neat Trick to make starships travel at some multiple of lightspeed, or a similar dodge away from actual relativistic physics.

Anyway, these ships used to have big crews, back in the early years of interstellar spaceflight, when pirates infested the skies. (Don't get your hopes up: that was a long time ago, and mentioned as deep backstory.) Now those ships are almost completely automated: each one has a single captain, for reasons that may be about crisis resolution, or just someone-to-take-the-fall-if-anything-goes-wrong. The captain has very little to do, most of the time.

Captain Moshi-Moshi Momo is the sole crew of the freighter Blue Chateau, currently on a 500-day trip from one unnamed port to another unnamed port. Momo has made this same run in the Chateau six times before, and done other trips up to a thousand days long, too. She's a seasoned, experienced captain who rarely if ever leaves her ship, even when it's in port.

She's also, apparently, a slim twenty-something Japanese young woman who prefers to spend all of her time naked, which gets me back to the fan-service. I'm assuming this fairly rich civilization has some kind of life-extension tech, which is why Momo has been captaining ships for what must be at least a couple of decades but looks like Tsuruta's favorite college-age hottie.

There are two other characters in Captain Momo. More important is Momo's cat, Grandpa John, her only companion on the Chateau. Tsuruta doesn't say that this unnamed shipping company encourages or requires its employees to have companion animals, but that could make sense. John is an absolutely normal cat, and does only cat things; his role in the book is largely to give Momo someone to talk at.

The third and final character is Momo's unnamed supervisor, who we know is at Proxima Centauri (and who we see in her underwear in a color frontispiece - did I mention this book is wall-to-wall fan-service?) and who talks to Momo a couple of times during the book. Alas, the Chateau is far enough from Proxima that there's a thirty-minute delay in their conversations, which makes them slow and not particularly useful.

Most of these dozen-plus episodes can be summarized as "Momo wanders about the ship, naked, talking to herself or John about various things." In her wanderings, she needs to do quite a bit of bending and stretching, squeezing through tight spaces, lying languidly reading or tossing restlessly while asleep, standing thinking with hands on hips or reaching over her head to get something. Did I mention she does all of those things naked? She does them naked. 

I may be a cynic, but I tend to think the bending and stretching are the real point of Captain Momo, and the dialogue and story are an excuse to get to them. Tsuruta has a scratchy, organic line, and he draws this character - she looks a lot like Mikura Amelia from Wandering Island, and, I understand, like most of Tsuruta's protagonists - attractively. So, if you want to see a lot of pages with a young woman who looks like that wandering about naked on her spaceship, with a cat kibitzing, you are in luck.

If you're interested in a slice-of-life story about a solo starship captain battling loneliness, and are less distracted by her attractive nakedness, though, you might not find very much in Secret Base at all.