Kazuo Umezu

Once again, Orochi stalks some people whose lives are falling to pieces, occasionally using her supernatural powers of telekinesis and healing to intervene slightly, but mostly just observing. These stories are not good, and I'm reading them as historical artifacts from a well-known manga creator's career rather than for pleasure.

Prodigy ~ 2 stars ~

A desperate man tries to rob the Watanabe family, but things go awry and the infant son of the family, Yu, ends up getting stabbed. Years later, the robber is in prison, and Mrs. Watanabe bullies and abuses Yu to study harder and harder so he can surpass his aloof father in intellect. No one acts like a normal person, but everyone's crazy motivations get explained in the end, though it's quite a slog through multiple outlandish developments getting there.

Home ~ 1 star ~

A man learns you can't go home again in this dull mishmash of the "It's a Good Life" episode of The Twilight Zone and The Children of the Corn with a godawful "It was all a dream" ending.

Key ~ 2 stars ~

A little boy who lies all the time gets himself into "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" trouble. Too long, too dull.… (mer)

Orochi is a young woman with supernatural powers and a tendency to wander into other people's life to watch them self-destruct.

In the first tale, "Sisters," she uses mind control of some sort to convince two sisters living in a big old house that she is their maid. She then watches them fall apart and turn on each other as they count down the days to the older girl's 18th birthday, a day when a family curse will cause her to start turning ugly.

In the second tale, "Bones," Orochi is posing as a nurse when she promises a grieving widow that she will resurrect her dead husband. It plays out in a wildly bizarre variation of "The Monkey's Paw."

The storytelling here is too outlandish and strange for my taste, with people who don't talk or behave like normal humans and a protagonist who is a cipher with undefined supernatural abilities. Despite that, I'll probably pick up the next volume if it wanders into my local library.… (mer)

Series Info/Source: This is the first volume in The Drifting Classroom: Perfect Edition. There are three Perfect Edition collections for this series. I got a copy of this as a gift for Christmas.

Thoughts: I enjoyed the initial premise and mystery behind this but wasn’t super impressed with the direction the story took. The illustration is well done and easy to follow but things just kind of went off the rails and didn’t make a lot of sense as the story continued.

The premise is that a whole elementary school disappears from modern day Japan and ends up somewhere “other”. There appears to be nothing but sand outside the building. As the school descends into anarchy because of panic-ridden adults (and some students) things begin to quickly collapse and the death toll rises to a staggering amount.

As I said above, I like the premise here but what I didn’t understand is what happened after the school ended up in the other place. Why were the adults going crazy and killing each other? Why were some of the students doing the same? Why did the adults suddenly get so violent with the other kids? Why were kids jumping off the roof convinced they were flying? There is a bit of hand waving explanation about people’s minds not being able to handle the change but it felt pretty weak to me.

I thought this was going to be more of a story about these kids and teachers exploring a new horrific world. I did not think they were all going to go nutty and be more of a danger to each other than any horrific landscape. They also spent nearly a whole book in this volume fighting a big bug thing which was just weird. I am going to give the story the benefit of the doubt and assume the giant bugs, madness, and general mayhem are actually a part of a larger cohesive story somehow…but by the end of this book I just felt kind of bored and mildly exasperated with the lack of any plot.

My Summary (3/5): Overall the initial premise is interesting and the illustration is well done and easy to follow. I was disappointed with where the story went though. I thought I was getting into some sort of horrific adventure and more it ended up being everyone just panicking and killing each other. I can only assume that the story gets more interesting in future volumes. Unfortunately, I won’t be reading those because these volumes are expensive and at least this volume is pretty much serving as a doorstop for me now…I have no desire to read it again. If you are into the whole people desperately killing each other in a school for no reason other than oddly unjustified panic, you might enjoy this more than I did.… (mer)