Review: Record Journey Vol. 1

Ryoichiro Kezuka's Record Journey is a rather literary manga, a collection of interrelated short stories that all revolve around records and music in one way or another. Kezuka dwells on the importance of music, particularly on how it can form and evoke memories and connect people to one another, but he makes his points with necessarily abstracted examples. The particular records, the most prominently featured band and even some of the countries which some of the stories are set in or refer to are all fictional. This first volume of the series has six chapters, comprising five stories (one is a two-parter) set in different parts of the world and, if I am reading them correctly, different eras (Kezuka's short afterword, during which the characters from different stories gather, seems to suggest as much, with talk of a "time paradox").The first story, "Recollection Record", stars Miyama, a young woman that works at a Japanese record shop called Miyama Records. She arrives at the home of…