Beautiful People (manga)

Beautiful People (ビューティフルピープル) is a gothic manga by Mitsukazu Mihara. It is a collection of six short stories and was published by Shodensha on October 20, 2001.

Plot
In "Princess White Snow" (雪白姫), a man finds an abandoned snow princess. He brings her back to his apartment, but despite his efforts to keep her alive after the air conditonioning is turned off, she dissolves into water. He uses the water to help grow a flower, something she had always wanted. "World’s End" (WORLD´S　END) focuses on the two survivors of a biochemical: a spoiled lesbian and a male homosexual. After he unsuccessfully attempts to rape her, she forces him to leave, only to later realize that she needs him. The third story, "Electric Angel" (アンチテレフォニカ), features a bullied teenage boy who unknowingly talks online with his mother, who left him with his father when he was young. In "The Lady Stalker" (ストーカーの女), a woman who believes she is stalked by a co-worker is later revealed to be delusional since the co-worker is in fact stalking her friend. The protagonist of "beautiful people" has plastic surgery done in the hope that she may become beautiful and loved, but after meeting a girl stitched from corpses, realizes that it was the girl who was truly beautiful since she gave love. The last story, "Blue Sky" (空気の中を抜ける空), focuses on the lifelong relationship between an abandoned girl and a vampire.

Release
Written and illustrated by Mitsukazu Mihara, the six short stories of Beautiful People were published in a tankōbon volume by Shodensha on October 20, 2001.

Tokyopop licensed the manga for an English-language release in North America and published it on February 7, 2006.

Reception
Beautiful People reached the 98th place in the list of 100 best-selling graphic novels for January 2006 with an estimated 823 copies sold.

A.E. Sparrow praised the collection, stating: "Just like any thing of beauty, it will stay in your mind for some time, if not forever. Much like Keats' Grecian Urn, some of these stories may well live on as a testament to what beauty is long after we're all gone." Sparrow ranked it 4th in the list of the top ten manga of 2006. While noting that the manga "is not 'entertaining' in the comedy sense, and reading it will leave you feeling uneasy", Mikhail Koulikov of Anime News Network called it "one of the finest examples of literary manga currently available in English". Mania Entertainment's Sakura Eries praised the "golden metallic finish" of the English-language cover; Eries described the stories as "short, but not light fare" and the character designs as "harsh or pathetic or desperate or trashy depending on the impact Mihara is trying to make."