Did I enjoy reading Banana Fish? Yes, until I read the ending.
Do I regret reading Banana Fish? Yes.
This review is based on reading the complete Banana Fish manga and the sequel story "Hikari no Niwa", or "Garden of Light", in Japanese.
A Note on Chinese Names in Banana Fish
A Chinese name is pronounced differently depending on the speaker's dialect (such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, or Shanghainese), but it is written the same way in kanji regardless of pronunciation.
In Banana Fish, there is only one scene in which the author provides katakana (pronunciations) for speech in a Chinese dialect by characters of Chinese ethnicity, and the katakana indicates that the characters are speaking Mandarin.
There is no basis in the original Japanese text for the characters' names to be pronounced in Chinese using a dialect other than Mandarin. Any non-Mandarin pronunciation, such as "Yut Lung", "Yau Si", or "Sing Soo-Ling", is not faithful to the original Japanese text.
Below are some of the Chinese names in Banana Fish.
シン・スウ・リン Shin Suu Rin (Japanese pronunciation given by author), no kanji given.
ショーター・ウォン Shootaa Won (Japanese pronunciation given by author), 肖達 (kanji given by author; no kanji given for Won), xiao4 da2 (Mandarin pronunciation in pinyin).
リー・ユエ・ルン Rii Yue Run (Japanese pronunciation given by author), 李月龍 (kanji given by author), li3 yue4 long2 (Mandarin pronunciation in pinyin).
The English pronunciation "Shorter" for Shootaa and any non-Mandarin pronunciations are made up by someone other than the author.
Minuses (-)
(-) Ash, beautiful, smart, rich, a crack shot, a super hacker, possessed of the Spidey-sense, able to identify a wine vintage in a single sip, is overpowered. On top of that, he is also plot-armored, of course. At some point during the series I stopped liking the character, possibly when he started killing people who had surrendered.
(-) Eiji fades into the background partway through the series, around the time the author runs out of Japan-US cultural gags. This might also be why the series ends the way it does.
(-) The ending is soul-crushing. It makes one think the author, over the nine or so years it took to write this series, grew to hate her readers.
(-) Pointless killing of characters occurs too often. The author introduces one powerful character in particular only to kill him 128 pages later. This indicates a lack of planning and overall vision. It takes more effort to keep a character alive than simply to kill him/her off.
(-) Between the action scenes are pages of dense dialogue that drag on too long, as though the author did not know what to plot next.
(-) The author portrays non-straight characters only negatively (alas, both Ash and Eiji are straight), specifically as perpetrators of lewd acts with minors, even though in the real world the majority of such perpetrators are straight.
(-) The artwork quality looks well below professional level, although it improves slightly in the second half of the series.
(-) Some characters of Chinese ethnicity, for example Rii Yue Run, are shown as stereotypical backstabbers with terrifying powers supposedly developed through thousands of years of Chinese civilization.
Pluses (+)
(+) The author writes thrilling action scenes. This is unusual for a shoujo author.
(+) Some characters of Chinese ethnicity, specifically Shin Suu Rin (the scenes featuring Shin and Eiji rank among the best in the whole series), Shootaa, and Maadia, are portrayed positively. In manga and anime, if there are any characters of Chinese ethnicity at all, they usually fit Japanese negative stereotypes.
(+) Secondary characters are strong and well-developed. Max is practically the hero of the first half of the series and Shin is practically the hero of the second half.
There are more minuses than pluses, so Banana Fish does not deserve a positive rating. If you do decide to read it, make sure you have something else to read immediately afterwards so you can recover from the soul-crushing ending.
