Manga / City

This is everyone's City.

"Long ago, there lived a bird. One day, the bird fell asleep while flying and a tragedy occurred. The bird flew beak-first into a long rock protruding up from the ground. The bird was afflicted by a disease which caused it to turn into stone as well, and so it remained lodged in the rock as eons passed by. In some eras it was worshiped, in others it was used for storage... Its function changed as it took root in different areas. And now...

This is the story of a City that has nothing to do with that bird."

— Opening narration, volume 1

What happens when a penniless college student moves into an ordinary city filled with extraordinary people?

CITY is a Japanese comedy manga by Keiichi Arawi. Starting as what seems to be a Spiritual Successor to Nichijou, the series follows Midori Nagumo, a sophomore student at Mont Blanc Uni with hardly a penny to her name. She's moved into the simply-named City and, together with her friends Ayumu Niikura and Wako Izumi, attempts to get herself enough money to get through her new life. Along the way, she meets a massive cast of people who bring this City to life.

The manga had begun publication in Morning in 2016 and concluded its run in February 2021. The manga was licensed for English release by Vertical Inc. in 2017, and released in English in March 2018.

Not to be confused with City Hunter, or the trope The City, although the City definitely qualifies for this at times.

---

And now... This is a list of tropes that has something to do with the CITY:

• All Elections Are Serious Business: The final arc, City, concerns an election for CITY's next mayor. Granny starts off as the only person in the running, who wants to make a four-year paradise for the senior population at the expense of virtually everyone else. In response, multiple teams form to stop her and get their own shot at becoming mayor. That said, the position isn't entirely lucrative— anyone can walk up and run for mayor, and the previous mayor only won because no one else wanted the job.
• And the Rest: The newscaster covering the candidates for CITY's mayoral election covered all of the most popular candidates (Granny, Mr. Makabe, Tanabe, and Hohoemi), and honestly but bluntly skipped over the other four candidates (Nice Man, Tekaridake, Toudou, and the policeman) and collectively called them the "nobodies". At least the station got into a little hot water for that.
• Art Shift: Sometimes, when Arawi wants to emphasize a delusion as romantic, he'll give everyone more detailed eyes and use screentones instead of his usual solid coloring. Tatewaku's delusions about Riko in Volume 12 are a good example of this.
• Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance: CITY's previous mayor, Dorobo Hokkamuri, wears an outfit that matches traditional Japanese depictions of a thief/dorobo (the patterned scarf over his head). His name is also a pun.
• The Big Race: Volume 8's arc focuses on the 4th Annual City Cup, a city-spanning footrace where eight random pairs of contestants are chosen to complete a rigorous and absurd obstacle course. Tanabe only structures the race as she does this year because she wants to somehow get closer to Tatsuta Adatara without making herself obvious.
• Brick Joke: Niikura teaches Nagumo how to do a "proper" duck-face, which Nagumo hopes to use on her boss when she wants a promotion or to get out of trouble. Chapter 14 hits, and she does use it...but Mr. Makabe only throws up instead.
• Brilliant, but Lazy:
  • Nagumo is an amazingly talented girl; she's excellent in sports and can do pretty much anything physical. However, she's also a jerk who barely skates by in life because she does everything last minute.
  • Riko Izumi is an engineering genius who regularly designs and builds elaborate contraptions in her spare time, but does poorly in school because she stays up so late working on her projects that she perpetually sleeps through class.
  • The entire CITY South soccer team has amazing talent in it, enough to win professional competitions...but none of that is ever used for soccer, and the boys eschew practice most days in favor of Sasago hard carrying the team when he isn't injured.
• Chekhov's Gag: Way back in the early part of the series, Niikura teaches Nagumo how to make a "proper" duckface (as instructed by Weekly CITY Magazine) in order to charm/seduce others. Cue the Grand Finale CITY arc, where the duo is desperate to secure voters for Mr. Makabe's mayoral campaign. His campaign team thinks they can appeal to voters with the sex appeal of young women, so the girls use their duckface in the middle of a crowd. Like the first time, it fails hard.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Riko appeared in one single frame at the start of the CITY Race in chapter 94. She is also the one making the Makabee explode, ensuring Matsuri and Ecchan's victory.
• City of Adventure: And how!
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Wako Izumi is more than a little out there. In her introductory chapter she casually mentions praying to a god she made up.
• Cringe Comedy:
  • Chapter 180 focuses on Niikura making a "morning routine" video about herself—which wouldn't ordinarily be too bad, save for the part where she's shown engineering everything about it to make it seem more normal, and the fact that she was well into the afternoon recording the first few minutes of her "day".
  • Tsuruishi realizes too late that people were asking for his pictures because of his photo appearing on a magazine, so he and his buddies spend hours making up merchandise to profit off of it. Only when they come out do they realize they missed that opportunity because their newfound fans turn their attention to Shia when they weren't looking.
• Dark Horse Victory: Amidst all the commotion for the Annual CITY race, every potential candidate gets knocked out or preoccupied with nonsense. Who wins? Matsuri and Ecchan, who were going along at their own pace for most of the race. Subverted at the very end, with the reveal that Wako intended for them to win and rigged the competition in their favor, so they could have a phenomenal memory before Ecchan left for England.
• Death as Comedy:
  • Professor Adatara plays a prank on Mr. Makabe, pretending that he'd died in his sleep. Professor Adatara intended to simply jump up when Mr. Makabe least expected it and reveal it as a prank, but to his surprise he died for real and was just about to be carted off by the Grim Reaper.
  • The extinction of an entire species is played for laughs in Volume 11. Tatewaku and Riko's book bag get captured by a force of octopus aliens and their oddly human leader, but the force of the bag pushing Tatewaku into the walls starts making the place collapse on itself. As a result, a whole chapter is devoted to the octopus aliens getting picked off one by one (with memorial pictures, to boot!), ending with their leader's shocked expression before getting picked off too.
• Decided by One Vote: In the final arc, voting comes down to Granny and Mr. Makabe as the frontrunners, with Takaridake disqualified for only having animal voters. The former two are evenly matched, with Granny even initially winning!—if not for Wako and Riko doing some last minute trolling. Wako sets up a scarecrow to make it look like Granny won, then reveals herself on Mr. Makabe's side to get him into the lead, which leads Riko to show up to make the voting even again..before her vote gets disqualified because she's not old enough yet.
• Didn't See That Coming: While Wako damn near planned out everything in the CITY Race, she was blind to two things—that Professor Adatara and Mr. Makabe would team up despite their rivalry (causing them to blast ahead of the competition with a modified delivery scooter), and that the CITY Race's BYO rule would ever be exploited, leading to Tanabe's men violently trying to stop the other contestants. Luckily she was Crazy-Prepared and brought Riko's remote control mines to the finish line to keep everybody she didn't want winning held back.
• Ensemble Cast: It's not just Nagumo's city, it's everybody's. The series likes to divide its attention between multiple focus groups, including the residents of Sweet Olive Manor, the Adatara family, the CITY Magazine editorial crew, the CITY South soccer team, and many others. Group crossover is not uncommon.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Good Person who eats at Makabe's Western Bistro. His name is never given, and everyone just recognizes him as a super nice person.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Just like one would naturally expect, CITY is a city. Other nearby settlements have similar short but apt titles, such as TOWN or COUNTRY.
• Failed a Spot Check: Easy Death Machine and Sannanbou, two horses instated in the CITY Gold Cup, are revealed mid-race not to be horses at all (one is a robot and the other a gazelle). While Sannanbou was eventually disqualified from competition for not being a horse, this was long after he'd already participated in the race and got disqualified for a completely different reason, while nobody ever questioned Easy Death Machine until it broke down near the finish line.
• The Fool: Wako is an incredibly upbeat and perpetually oblivious young lady who seems to constantly stumble into good fortune.
• Franchise Zombie: Happens in-universe with Mr. Bummer: Life Sure is Hard, If You Ask Me. When we're first introduced to the plotline, the creator, Kamaboko Oni, has finally run out of ideas and ends the long-running comic...then the replacement artist falls through at the last minute and he and his editor desperately struggle to keep Mr. Bummer going...
• Gadgeteer Genius: Dr. Adatara and Riko Izumi
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: Niikura once finds a 500 yen coin on the ground, and she wonders if she should return it to its owner. Five devils appear one after the other urging her to take it, but she's so passive and conflicted that she leaves it in the street. Only after the owner comes back for the coin and after she gets chewed out by he devils for her inaction does the angel come with proper advice.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: Chapter 110 is devoted to the kids trying, and failing, to invoke this trope. In addition, Matsuri explains a modern trend where bands strive for a blur between what can be recognized as a band name and what can be recognized as a song name, which only gets harder as the volume of bands increases.
• Honor Before Reason: The animosity between Nagumo and Granny gets as bad as it did because both are too proud to end their feud—Nagumo because she blows all her money before she even thinks about paying, and Granny because she won't accept anything less than Nagumo begging for forgiveness. When the former does have money she can pay Granny back with, the old woman refuses to accept it unless she prostrates herself. In reality, Granny is having fun challenging Nagumo like this and wants to have as much fun as she can before their debt war is over.
• Horrorscope: Tatewaku spends a decent chunk of the first volume wearing a mini-skirt (much to his chagrin) because his horoscope listed it as his "lucky item". A later segment reveals the staff of the local newspaper determine the horoscopes by throwing darts at a big wheel since no one actually believes their predictions anyway.
• Instant Cosplay Surprise: In chapter 122 of the tankoubon version (119 in the Morning Magazine version), as Niikura instantly changes Nagumo into her Youtube costume.
• Internal Homage: The opening sequence about the bird petrifying and having its used changed over the years is repeated in Volume 11, where Kamaboko Oni starts his new Mr. Bummer series with this and provides it as the origin of Mr. Bummer himself.
• Just in Time: CITY South is about to be eliminated from a match because a handful of players aren't there, but one by one they come back to start the game. As it turns out a majority of them were late because they were winning other sports competitions (Kurogane with a baseball game for their school's team, Naeba with fishing, Shirogane with e-sports, Kasuga with a running marathon, and the others overslept), but their determination to play together is short-lived due to Sasago being injured again.
• Loophole Abuse: The CITY Race, while requiring people to team up in pairs, also advises participants to "Bring Your Own". Once this is revealed at the end of the race, everybody begins to exploit the rule, with Teriadake shifting his partner to his mouse and the BYO to his animal companions and Kamaboko Oni's fanbase counting themselves as the BYO since his fame "brought" them to him.
• Limited Wardrobe: Lampshade Hanging as Nagumo's only summer outfit is her plethora of blue hoodies. Niikura even asks if this is a cartoon.
• Mistaken for Gay: Niikura's beloved locket, which has a photo of a younger Nagumo inside of it, gets stolen by an animal and ran around town. Matsuri and Ecchan only know the most surface level knowledge about this, and think that Niikura is really in love with Nagumo.
• Mood Whiplash: Chapter 29 is just a silly episode of Matsuri and Ecchan playing tricks around town and hanging out, but the mood of the whole chapter changes in the final page, when Ecchan's mother reveals that she's moving away and hasn't told Matsuri yet. a good handful of Matsuri and Ecchan's chapters have this mood swing too.
• Never Mess with Granny: The Makabe family matriarch is rather prone to violence whenever anyone fails to pay their rent on time or gets in the way of her collecting their rent. She once successfully beat up an entire mob of citizens trying to stop her from selling Nagumo's belongings as collateral for paying rent.
• Once Upon a Time: The manga opens with a Non Sequitur about a bird who flew into a rock.
• Offscreen Romance: Tanabe and Tatsuta's entire romance is offscreened. While we're aware of Tanabe only starting the 4th annual CITY Race to ask Tatsuta out on a date, the rest of the courtship is skipped over, up until the final arc where Tanabe announces their engagement in the tail end of the mayoral election campaign.
• Paper Fan of Doom: Niikura makes a real-life version specifically to invoke the type of slapstick routine it's usually used for when she gets fed up with Nagumo and Wako's antics.
• Plot Coupon: The 4th Annual City Race features eight random confirmation tickets spread throughout town. Only the sixteen people who found the tickets can participate this year, making everyone else livid.
• Plucky Girl: Wako Izumi is a perpetually upbeat and cheerful young lady...who is also completely out of her gourd.
• Production Throwback: To Nichijou:
  • In the full color double-page of chapter 1, there's a poster of the book "Hand" by Hajime Sakurai at the Tomuraushi Bookstore.
  • Niikura said Nagumo graduated from Tokisadame High School.
  • In the color page of volume 2, there's a pack of Snq snack.
  • Mio's oneshot Stop!! Kiss Thief! shows up in this series as Daisuke Naganohara's most famous and completed serialized manga.
• Rain of Blood: The mob that Granny beat up in Volume 1 begins gushing High-Pressure Blood out of their noses into the air, causing a blood rainfall that prompts Niikura to open an umbrella.
• Roommate Com: Niikura unwittingly finds herself in the middle of one of these when Nagumo moves in with her after having her gas and electricity turned off and Wako moves into her closet because she thought it would be fun.
• Rule of Three: Wako believes that good things come in threes... literally. Meaning that if three good things happen to her in a day, she can't get any other good things that day, so she tries to return one of her good things in order for a different good thing to happen.
• School of No Studying: Mont Blanc Uni, where the students seem to just lounge around the campus until something interesting goes on.
  Niikura: This is a college campus. Ergo... It's a nest of people with nothing else to do!
• Secretly Selfish: There is a barber in the city that generously gives out free short-style haircuts. However, the only reason he does this is because he knows CITY residents are too kind to actually go through with a free haircut and will repay him with items instead. He can also count on certain regulars to give him expensive and surprisingly rare items he can sell online.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • The CITY South soccer team wants their ace, Sasago, to walk away from future games uninjured because he's the only one on their team that can play soccer well. To facilitate this, they all decide to be his bodyguards, clear away all possible obstacles that could harm him, and wait on him hand and foot so he doesn't somehow hurt himself. Sasago is a little annoyed, but touched by the efforts everyone is going through to continue playing with him...but just as they begin a practice game, he lightly trips on a gopher's head and gets injured for a week.
  • "CITY Gold Cup" covers a horse race taking place offscreen. The race quickly gets out of hand when Miss Strawberry and the local darkhorse (Sannanbou) get into a skirmish, but after a crazy start Sannanbou ends up as the overall winner of the race...before its immediate disqualification, because the judges realized too late that Sannanbou is a gazelle and not a horse.
  • A rare positive example for Kamaboko Oni. For most of the series, he agonizes about wanting to discontinue Mr. Bummer because he ran out of ideas for it, and only begins working on it again when he hears he's being replaced by a more popular mangaka. He even gets into a fight with his longtime editor over the decision, and makes a whole pilot chapter as a way of apologizing to him. Cue Volume 10, where we learn that the manga that was set to replace Mr. Bummer was a pornographic Boys' Love historical manga and would never have left the editing room anyway. Oni keeps his job, and this fiasco was all for nothing.
• Shipper on Deck: Wako initially assumes Nagumo and Niikura are a couple when she first encounters them and seems really into the idea of them hooking up.
• Show Within a Show: Mr. Bummer : Life Sure is Hard, If You Ask Me, a manga serialized in CITY Weekly Magazine.
• Shout-Out:
  • In the CITY Gold Cup, three of the horses mentioned are Supercali, Fragilistic, and Expiali.
  • Chapter 80's official English title is "No Summer Vacation for Old Men".
  • The English translation of Chapter 83 has one CITY South member shout "Go-Go Gadget heart attack".
  • One of the first obstacles in the City Cup is called the "Wonderwall". A few chapters later one chapter was even named after Oasis.
  • Chapter 91 is named after a line in H2O's "Full of Memories".
  • In Chapter 108, Shia gives an autograph to someone who either is or is cosplaying Dragon Quest III's Erdrick.
  • Tatewaku's final band name suggestion in Chapter 110 is an awkward mix of the holiday that falls on his birthday (Obon) and the feeling that you get during festivals (jovial): Bon Jovi.
  • Niikura rants about the weather being so hot that she'd reenact The Clash's London Calling album cover rather than make the most of her remaining 10 minutes on the way home.
  • The aliens that kidnap Tatewaku and Riko's invention have a Sniper Chief with eyes and matching eyebrows resembling Golgo 13.
  • A gang of pirates have a destination board with their initial goal listed as Treasure Island. When they change the destination to help Tatewaku reach Riko Izumi, the captain holds Tatewaku up in a reenactment of the bow scene in Titanic (1997).
• Sleepyhead: Wako's sister Riko. We're introduced to her falling asleep in class...in the middle of being asked a question by her teacher. Pretty much all of her appearances have her either asleep or on the verge of losing consciousness.
• Slice of Life
• Something We Forgot: Right before they start another one of their losing games, City South is too caught up in their euphoria of joining together after a series of late misses that they forget that Sasago isn't there with them. Not that his presence would help in any way, since he hurt his leg again.
• Springtime for Hitler: The Yokoo brothers design clothes in their spare time for fun, but once they sent in one deliberately made to look like tattered rags as a joke. Little did they know that Tatewaku bought it thinking it was high fashion.
• Stealth Sequel: To Nichijou, another one of Keiichi Arawi's works. The end of Volume 1 implies a full blown case of Canon Welding when an artist named Daisuke Naganohara (A Pen Name Mio frequently used in Nichijou) is hired to create a replacement comic for Mr. Bummer in the local newspaper.
• Trying Not to Cry: After weeks of putting it off, Ecchan finally decides to tell Matsuri that she's moving away. Both of them are trying their hardest to not be broken up about it, with both cracking jokes so they don't have to be reduced to sobbing wrecks and using the pumpkin mask Ecchan put on Matsuri as their excuses (so Matsuri can cry freely while Ecchan doesn't have to look her in the eye to break the bad news).
• Underdogs Never Lose: According to betters in CITY's local horse racing pool, the no-hopers usually consist of the racers Sannanbou and Miss Strawberry. However, Sannanbou somehow pulls through with a win despite getting disqualified for starting a fight with Strawberry and falling behind pretty quickly. Exploited by the betters, since damn near half the city put their money on Strawberry and Sannanbou to the confusion of the announcer:
  "Why did so many people bet on these dark horses?! Why were these horses dark horses, and not the favorites?!"
• Visual Pun:
  • Wako once surprises someone by coming in with a flock of pigeons covering her body. She explains that this happened because she started shooting peas at them, evoking the Japanese idiom "like shooting a pigeon with a peashooter".
• Webcomic Time: The events of the manga take place over the course of one summer, compared to the five years it took to complete the story out-of-universe.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Used at the end of Volume 11 for the pirates who take Tatewaku onboard with them. Most of the pirates end up with pretty satisfactory lives (with one even founding a town), except for one poor sod who only develops bad cholesterol.
• Worst News Judgement Ever: Weekly CITY Magazine. Its publication consists of 2 pages of horoscopes, a page of manga, 4 pages of articles, and 93 pages of advertisements.
• Xanatos Gambit: At the end of the 4th CITY race Wako reveals she'd manipulated pretty much all the events that happened leading up to and during the race so Matsuri and Ecchan would win.