Category Archives: reviews

Higurashi: When They Cry, Vol. 15

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Story by Ryukishi07; Art by Karin Suzuragi. Released in Japan as “Higurashi no Naku Koro ni: Tsumihoroboshi-hen” by Square Enix, serialized in the magazine Gangan Powered. Released in North America by Yen Press.

It’s Halloween, and time for all good bloggers to discuss horror. And so I will talk about Higurashi, which may be a mystery series, and may also be a harem series, but is first and foremost known for its graphic horror. This volume starts a new arc, with events once again reset to the middle of June. There’s a basic horror in the premise: the cast are dying in horrible ways over and over, each time with someone falling into a spiral of paranoia and insanity. Worst of all, the young priestess Rika seems to be aware of the previous iterations. Will this arc, focusing on the cute redhead Rena, be any more optimistic?

Well, probably, but not in this first volume. This is the start of the “Atonement” arc, which is the mirror of the first arc of the entire series, the ‘Abducted by Demons’ arc. Unlike the previous Shion arc, however, which told the same events but from a new perspective, this is showing an entirely different plot, focusing on Rena. We do start off bright and happy as always, with Rena and the rest of the club playing a penalty game with water guns in gym class. As the story goes on, though, we realize that the chapter title “Happy Rena” is misleading, and that she uses a smile to mask her inner pain and sadness. And what’s more, it’s getting obvious.

Rena is an interesting case. Most of the previous arcs have shown the protagonist (Keiichi at first, then Shion) start off relatively well-adjusted, then slowly the paranoia and madness seeps into them as they start imagining things that aren’t really happening. Rena’s backstory shows us that she’s already been committed for a long period after her parent’s divorce, and has attempted suicide as well as assault. And while moving back to Hinamizawa helped briefly, now that a new woman is cozying up to her father, the old feelings are starting up again.

In addition to Rena not really needing much impetus to get her started into killing other people, the people she’s dealing with are those that we’re not really going to miss. It turns out that her father’s new love is a gold digger who leeches onto men and gradually strips them of their money… something she casually brags about in a cafe while on the arm of Satoko’s uncle. Remember him? Back in the Curse Killing arc, we saw his physical and mental abuse of the fragile Satoko. Combined with his new love, they’re a couple that Rena is allowed to kill while still retaining the audience’s sympathy… or are they? Does anything justify murder?

As for the horror elements in this volume, for those who were creeped out by the fingernail torture in the Eye Opening Arc, well, we may have found a way to top it. Rena’s repressed rage and despair apparently comes into her head in the form of imaginary maggots that are inside her skin. Note they don’t feel imaginary to her – or to us, as we see them a few times, most notably bursting from her neck as she tries to kill herself in a flashback. Karin Suzuragi’s art is generally considered the “cutest” and most “moe” of the group of artists adapting the series, so this is particularly grotesque. There’s also Rena’s murder of Rina, the aforementioned gold-digger. The anime keeps things vague and silhouetted, but the manga has no trouble being graphic, showing Rina being beaten to death with a pipe (after trying to strangle Rena, to be fair) and begging for her life once she realizes what Rena will do. Oh yes, and eyeballs bulging from sockets, a Higurashi classic.

Higurashi makes for an excellent horror series, but it’s the mystery and characters that keep me coming back after so many deaths and resets. This isn’t the final arc, so I know things will turn south – they already have. But I want to know if the heroes can get any closer to redeeming Rena, and if she can find the “atonement” the arc title implies. I also want to know why this reset keeps happening. There’s got to be more to it than just torturing teenagers over and over again. Gripping, unnerving, and with a jarring contrast between art and events. Welcome to Hinamizawa.

No Longer Human, Vol. 1

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By Usamaru Furuya, based on the novel by Osamu Dazai. Released in Japan by Shinchosha, serialized in the magazine Weekly Comic Bunch. Released in North America by Vertical.

Vertical released 3 new series in quick succession this past month, and this may be the least talked about of the three. However, it should be talked about more, as it’s excellent, with Furuya creating a disturbing mood of suffocation and pretense as he adapts a classic Japanese novel about despair into modern times.

The original novel by Dazai was released in 1948, and is still beloved in Japan. We’ve seen its influence here already; the first Book Girl novel used it as a focal point, and Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei has many similarities between its protagonist and the narrator of No Longer Human. Furuya uses a bit of a distancing device to bookend the manga, showing himself looking at a website that supposedly describes the life of Yozo Oba, a young man who seems dissolute and bored with life.

The back cover notes that he takes refuge in clowning, but honestly we only see that for the first chapter of the book. In reality, Yozo has a different face for each situation he’s in, and seems to throw on personalities at random. This is not all that uncommon, of course, but he’s also a teenager, and seems to regard his attitude as unique and everyone else as being happy and content. In other words, Yozo thinks too much. As the manga goes on, various bad things start happening to him, but he deals with it by either reacting on the fly or drifting aimlessly. Yozo lacks a purpose.

This isn’t a horror manga (more on that later in the week), but there are certainly several images within that could be right at home in a horror anthology. Furuya loves to draw surrealistic mindscapes showing his characters’ fractured psyches, and so we see swirling faces, blank puppet eyes, and dolls breaking apart in the sea. What Yozo goes through is no picnic, either – he may start out as a rich dilettante, but his family curtails his allowance, then cuts him off completely. And the political group he joins turns out to be a terrorist organization. Is it any wonder he ends Volume 1 where he does?

As with Genkaku Picasso, the emphasis here is on imagery. Furuya is served well by a pre-existing plot, however, even if he’s adapting it to modern times, and so things hold together better than they did in Picasso. This is also for a far older audience than Picasso; there are several scenes with Yozo having sex, and there’s also some violence and graphic situations, particularly at the end of the first volume. No one is going to have their psyche magically fixed by a pen here.

As with most of Furuya’s works, No Longer Human isn’t for everyone. But I definitely regarded it as a step up from Picasso, and it lacks (so far) the sexual violence and gore of Lychee Light Club. Intriguingly, the flipped format we see here *isn’t* flipped – Furuya redrew his entire manga left-to-right for the French market, and Vertical is using that version. It works very well. For those looking for a psychological thriller with intellectual overtones, give this a try.

Drifting Net Café, Vol. 1

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By Shuzo Oshimi. Released in Japan by Futabasha, serialized in the magazine Manga Action. Released in the United States by Futabasha on the JManga website.

Of all the titles released so far by JManga, no magazine has more examples of its wares than Futabasha’s seinen magazine Manga Action. It’s a bi-weekly magazine that caters to the same sort of reader as all of the ‘Young’ magazines, which is to say each edition features a hot Japanese gravure model on the cover. Now, to be fair, the content is just as varied as any other magazine for men. You have bento manga, medical manga, sports manga, and even Star Protector Dog. That said, you also have manga about guys trapped in loveless marriages who end up with the hot girl of their dreams.

Drifting Net Café stats off with this basic plot. Toki is a salaryman with a pregnant wife, and is dissatisfied with how he got there. Yukie, his wife, is having mood swings; he’s incredibly horny but unable to have sex; and he keeps thinking about the girl he had a crush on in high school, whom he hasn’t seen since then. Then one day as it’s raining he goes into a net café to ride it out, and runs into none other than his old crush!

So far so normal, and the entire first volume is set up so that you’re supposed to root for the adultery. Yukie is cute, and he loves her in that ‘yeah, whatever’ sort of way, but with Tohno it’s clear he still has chemistry and an undefinable spark. Unfortunately, they can’t immediately hook up because the café they’re in is suddenly transported to the middle of a hostile swampy desert in the middle of nowhere.

Yes, that’s right, this isn’t just an adulterous salaryman romance manga, it’s also a takeoff on Kazuo Umezu’s classic horror title The Drifting Classroom. Instead of children, we have bored and jaded young twenty-somethings cast adrift, and the conflict between then erupts almost immediately. We’re only one volume in, so we don’t really get to know the whole cast, but the characters we’ve seen get in the spotlight have issues. I honestly can’t even remember their names, I define them by their roles. The huge guy with some sort of rage disorder. The shallow girl who whines about wanting to go home. The psycho guy.

Speaking of the psycho guy, this is another manga rated M for mature. For most of the volume, that’s due to the occasional bout of violence, with folks beating up other folks because they’re all confused at being transported from Tokyo to a strange swamp in the middle of nowhere. Then right at the end, one of the meek characters, who’s been bullied by his boss since the start, goes nuts. He stabs his boss with a penknife, then grabs the shallow girl and forces her to go down on him at knifepoint. It’s as sordid as it sounds, and made me feel ill. Then another guy pulls out a taser… and that’s our cliffhanger. Didn’t take long for morality to erode, much like its older counterpart.

So we’ve got a wannabe cheating hero, a heroine who through one volume is still somewhat faceless (in flashbacks, she’s shown to be the cool mysterious beauty, but in the present she seems very passive), a lot of violence, and we end with sexual assault. Is there something to like about this title? Well, it’s certainly very good at setting a mood. From the moment we enter the net café, there’s a creeping feeling of horror that is conveyed very well on the page. I’m just… not sure I want to read the mood that this story is good at setting. If you want to see a horror/mystery title with a side of sex and violence, this may be for you. As for me, it lost me by the final chapter.