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Mima No 5, dressed in a flouncy pink skirt, black sleeveless blouse, and long black gloves, will sing pop songs next to a 7-foot tall Coke bottle, a life-sized model of Ultraman, and a bobble-head Peko-chan to entertain you while you browse through the 500,000 comic books that fill the shelves of the Mandarake Comic Shop.
Here you will find gel cels from animation features, a hand-painted Godzilla model for 300,000 yen, a copy in fine condition of "Zero Jin" the 1950s superhero battling an ameba (50,000 yen), a vintage "King Kong Comic" for 600,000 yen, or fading issues of "Kid of Plain, Sabu" or "Cowboy" comics. If you are ready to part with your old Doraemon volumes, you can bring them here, stand in line with the other customers holding shopping bags filled with comics no longer needed and sell your once cherished books for a 50 or 60 yen the book.
Everything and anything connected to comics is here: action figures, souvenirs, toys, telephone cards, laser discs, videos, stuffed animals, soup dispensers, pens, and shelves and shelves and shelves of comics receding into the character-hazed distance.
The cavernous world of Mandarake is for dyed-on-the-page comic fanatics or collectors, or merely the comic curious. The wide wooden planks on the floor creak when you push your supermarket shopping cart along them, but Mima No 5 doing a perky number drowns out most sounds.
Mandarake is spreading the comic gospel worldwide with a shop in Torrance, CA and a website in Japanese, Chinese, English, and Italian. Mandarake also purveys in Shinjuku and Nakano.
--mjk
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