Wow. I found this manga to be absolutely tremendous, and one of those rare stories that I just know is going to stay with me for a very long time. Like a lot of the best manga out there it also transcends genre, existing somewhere between shounen-ai and horror while becoming something else entirely. It feels sort of post-modernist in an odd way. In a lot of ways this manga reminded me of the films of both David Lynch and David Cronenberg, which is both a compliment and a bit of a warning, heh. I have to say how incredibly unique and beautiful and original the art is. It honestly looks both familiar and natural while also being unlike anything else I’ve seen before. The characters facial expressions seemed especially striking to me, and I found myself studying them for minutes at a time. Extremely deep art with some pretty original use of background sound effects and thoughts. I really appreciated that Yen printed this in the slightly larger format, as it certainly benefits from the bigger pages. I have to mention the one aspect I disliked somewhat which was the localization/translation. Presumably the characters are from Kansai and thus speak the Kansai dialect, which always seems to challenge localization efforts and generally gets portrayed as a weird sort of laid-back west-coast “dude” accent, or sometimes as a southern accent, or even as a bizarre mish-mash of both which appears to be what we have here. It’s pretty distracting at times, and if every other aspect of this manga wasn’t so original and superb and memorable and perfect, it would cause me to knock off a star or even two. But the rest of the manga really and truly is more than great enough to overcome this particular flaw. I can’t really quite decide how literal I should take this manga, though. On the one hand I feel like there’s a fairly straightforward sort of horror story taking place, where this vaguely Lovecraftian demon-thing has assumed the identity of this boy. On the other hand, I feel like the whole thing is also a sort of metaphor for unrequited love and longing, and how one’s feelings can become monstrous and corrupted. I really haven’t decided yet, I guess there’s a second volume so we’ll see. Finally, I feel the need to make mention of the age rating, which appears to be Teen/13+. This is pretty much right on in the sense that there’s definitely no sex or explicit violence. But this manga is… pretty disturbing and upsetting, and frankly pretty darn grown-up in terms of what’s being explored, even though it’s about kids. There’s one particular scene that comes midway through the book that’s especially weird and disturbing and vaguely sexual, where Yoshiki puts his hand inside “Hikaru” in a sequence that vaguely reminded me of Videodrome. So yeah, even though it says 13+ I have to say that I would never give this to a 13-year-old to read. Read more