Nothing is quite as it seems in IWGP (Digital Manga Publishing). This is a good thing, since it doesn’t seem at first glance like a manga I’d particularly enjoy. But writer Ira Ishida has a way with the unexpected, taking what could be a standard story of aimless youth and turning it into a disturbing mystery.
The early chapters seem to promise a mildly edgy, punks-in-love tale, set in Ikebukuro West Gate Park. Trendy girls mix and mingle with delinquents as gangs lurk on the fringes. Makoto and Masa are two of the delinquents, and Hikaru and Rika are the sweet young things they meet on New Year’s Eve.
Makoto rescues Hikaru from some boys who have graduated from delinquent to thug. Rough-around-the-edges Makoto and innocent Hikaru spark immediately, but he winds up in bed with outgoing Rika instead. It’s here that the undercurrents emerge, as Ishada makes you wonder if Hikaru is as sweet and uncomplicated as she seems and starts to drop hints as to just how Rika keeps herself in microscopic skirts and platform boots.
There are darker forces at work in the park, too. A serial strangler is on the loose. The place is overrun with G Boys, an oddly surreal street gang led by quirky “king” Takashi. When one of the strangler’s victims dies, Makoto takes it hard and turns to the G Boys to help him track the killer.
Ishida, adapting the story from his award-winning mystery novel, borrows elements from noir and gang drama, but he avoids some of the pitfalls of those genres. IWGP, ably rendered by artist Sena Aritou, doesn’t have the artsy self-consciousness of some noir, and it doesn’t trot out the puffed-up, misplaced sense of honor many gang stories do.
It has an organic feel; events don’t necessarily move directly from point A to point B. The dialogue, translated well by Duane Johnson, comes in fits and starts at times. The characters aren’t flawlessly articulate people, but they have distinct voices. Happily, the talk doesn’t fall into the kind of fragmented naturalism that can be so grating.
The tone has significant shifts that are both shocking and perfectly logical. Those shifts are represented in the explicitness (both violent and sexual) of the material. A sequence depicting the G Boys’ interrogation of a strangler suspect is graphically, unexpectedly violent, even given the increasingly dark nature of the story. Another scene set in a couples’ tea house has an overt but empty sexuality that’s jarring. It points up the potential disconnect between intimacy and closeness that runs through the volume.
The effect of these severe moments is to drive home just how out of their depth the protagonists are. They’ve taken things at face value, running on the indestructibility of youth, and they get slapped in the face with just how ugly the world can be.
All of the characters are nicely developed, and all of them have secrets. Makoto is a fine focal point for the story. He’s a hedonist without much ambition, but he’s still able to be moved by innocence. He’s also got a capacity for guilt, and it’s triggered by the pivotal death that sets things spinning. While he manages to navigate the various forces shifting through the park (including the police), his impulsiveness gets him in trouble. He feels deeply, but he doesn’t think carefully.
As the first volume ends, new dangers crop up, characters’ true natures are called into question, and things that seemed resolved almost certainly aren’t over yet. Ishida and Aritou successfully create an air of menace and an intriguing cast to draw the reader to the next chapter. It’s violent, lurid, and out of my usual comfort zone, but damned if I don’t want to know what happens next.
(This review is based on a copy provided by Digital Manga Publishing.)