Normally with a manga, I'd like to wait until it either it was finished, or I was finished buying it. I broke that rule for Yotsuba&! because I don't know when Kiyohiko Azuma will finish it, and I'm breaking it with Wandering Island for the same reason. I bought the first volume back in 2016, then second volume came out in 2018, and there's been nothing since then.
The story revolves around Mikura, a teenage girl who ran an air delivery service with her grandfather based out of the island of Oshima. The story starts with Mikura learning her grandfather died while she was on a delivery run. While grieving around the house, she finds a package addressed to her in her grandfather's writing, from no address she knows. Namely, a place called the Electric Island. Mikura sets out to find Electric Island, but is stuck going off hearsay and decades of journal entries her grandfather kept about it.
Tsurata dispenses with Mikura's parents in about three panels, when her sour-faced mom tells her to come visit, 'once you calm down.' So much for family helping someone through the mourning process. It becomes an obsession for Mikura, which Tsurata highlights through several pages spent on her chasing leads, talking to locals, contacting academics her grandfather knew about currents. A reader could feel the story bogging down in it, but I like how it outlines her process, how important this has become to her.
Tsurata also shows this via lots and lots of pages of Mikura flying over open ocean. Either panels of her leaning over the cockpit scanning for anything below, or splash pages of her just flying, nothing else in view but sea and sky. It doesn't necessarily capture a sense of grace or wonder that can come with flight, but it does emphasize the amount of space, how easy it is to be alone in the air.
Her first sighting (and subsequent crash), only spur her on. By the end of the second volume, she finds it again, and this time winds up stranded there. Tsurata hadn't really gotten any further with it than that. There are some locals, very few of which are friendly, and some actively hostile. But nothing beyond that, like why they're hostile (and if they are, why not let her drown), while they live on a floating city that's design reminds me of some old Italian mountain town, with narrow alleys, steep roads and buildings practically stacked on top of each other.
Maybe Tsurata will get back around to it once of these days.
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