"Suu-chan's laidback life takes a sharp turn into a strange place!", boasts a chapter insert for Kotonoba Drive. Nothing could be further from the truth, if only because there really aren't any "sharp turns" in Kotonoba Drive. Drive is as iyashikei as iyashikei gets. It is by design devoid of things like serious character development, dramatic tension, and excessive narrative motion. Instead, like all iyashikei, Kotonoba Drive lives and dies on the strength of its atmosphere and mood. Thankfully, no one could ever accuse Kotonoba Drive of lacking either.

The premise really could not be simpler. Suu, who works at a "spaghetti shack" (a small rural restaurant, essentially) ridiculously named Noodle Lamp with her boss and seemingly, no one else. Every day, she rides home from work on her motorcycle, and every day, for just five minutes, another world intrudes on her own, and engulfs her. These shifts aren't treated with much of a sense of mystery--at least not of the solvable kind. They're treated a bit more like the small wonders of nature, like the northern lights. We're told that Suu has been experiencing these shifts since she was a child and as such, they no longer really phase her. And her appreciation for them (and for the simple pleasure of riding her bike in the first place) is palpable and infectious. To put it more simply, this is a manga that manages to do a lot with very little, and it's adept at sucking you into its small worlds.

The shifts explored in the manga take various forms, and seem to vary in intensity (though their exact nature is not a focus of the narrative and really, there isn't a main narrative). The first has Suu stopping in a fog bank, only to suddenly find herself just off of a shallow sea. In another, she meets a mysterious red-haired girl who appears to be able to follow her on her bike no matter where she goes. In a third, while waiting out the rain in her boss' truck, a portable shrine festival passes by in the midst of the lightning and thunder. In yet another, she encounters a boy who locomotes via riding a giant beetle, and gets a chance to briefly try riding the creature herself. By their very nature, these slipstreams into another realm are limited in scope. Suu's small amount of time--just five minutes--prevents them from starting any full-on adventures as might take place in some other kind of manga, but at the same time, Suu's exaggerated experiences are really quite reminiscent of the small joys of growing up in the countryside and discovering an unknown nook, a small creek or pond, an abandoned building, and so on. Some of these are more unusual than others, just as some of Suu's shifts seem to come from our own world, whereas others, like the boy with the beetle, from other worlds entirely, but in a way that just deepens the similarity between Suu's experiences and our own.

#####The mangaka's soft, impressionistic art style lends itself expertly to scenes like these. Where natural phenomena like glowing plankton in the ocean (above) or rain (below) are given a vaporous, hazy quality that contrasts with Suu, grounded and at the forefront. --

There is the occasional deeper dive. The beetle-riding boy is reprised several chapters later when Suu meets his older sister and discovers that they live as spirits, seemingly unnoticeable by most. A parrot that takes the form of a young girl appears twice, and so on. It is sometimes implied that Suu is seeing the world as it really is, as opposed to seeing things from somewhere else. But again, the nature of her "power" (if it can even be called that), is not explored in detail. Later chapters also de-emphasize Suu's bike--having her at work, hitching a ride from her boss (or her boss' daughter Haruka, another recurring character), or hanging out with a friend when her episodes hit--tweaking the formula in the process. The ever-so-slight expansion of scope prevents the manga from getting stale, as it might if it were strictly Suu alone on her bike all the time. There's also the rare very slight spookiness, but nothing that ever gets creepier than the most benign campfire tale.

To reiterate, Suu herself is really one of the main things that make the manga work. She's an absolutely charming person; caring, content, and possessing of more than one oddball habit (a late chapter has her reveal to us that she sometimes collects acorns for no particular reason). She's quirky, but close enough to realistic that she grounds the manga instead of having it float away. And her nonchalant reactions to the strange happenings she invites seem, therefore, the product of a mind who's become accustomed to strangeness, rather than a forced element, something that's even pointed out by Haruka in the manga's penultimate chapter, wherein the manga takes a very slight left turn. Haruka, perhaps by Suu's influence, begins to experience the same strangeness that she does. In the last chapter, Suu sees her past self through the Noodle Lamp's window, and reminisces on why she began working there in the first place.

These small--infinitesimal really--narrative developments that come at the manga's very end would be mere footnotes, barely worth mentioning, in almost any other kind of series. But the decompressed, easy pace, and gentle mood of the iyashikei genre lets these moments matter far more than they might outside of that context.

It should come as no surprise, hearing all of this, that Kotonoba Drive is the most recent work of Hitoshi Ashinano, he of Record of Yokohama Shopping Trip fame, and one of the architects of iyashikei's "ambient manga" approach in the first place. To be certain, Kotonoba Drive is a smaller-scale work, but it shows that he still has a masterful command of atmosphere, and as an escape from the hustle and bustle, and into a just slightly unusual vision of the endless everyday, it is an easy recommendation.