Ikebukuro West Gate Park 1

Man, I’ve been getting some disturbing porno search engine hits lately. It’s funny every once in awhile, but it makes me wonder what I’ve said to get so many creepy search strings to hit.

Anyway! So I bought this series over a year ago on sale, because I’m always up for a little 4-volume murder mystery. For whatever reason, I got volumes 1,2, and 4 right away, but it took over a year for volume 3 to come back in stock. Reading all four together is the way to go for this type of series, so I saved it for a little vacation like this one.

So far, it’s really WEIRD. There are a lot of characters. It’s sometimes hard to follow the relationships between them as far as… who knows who, who’s afraid of who, who beats up who, etc. But it’s written in such a way as to totally brush off the importance of that type of thing. The characters seem to meet up with one another to get particular jobs done… be it hanging out with one another, sleeping with one’s girlfriend, or teaming up to bust a criminal. I was a little unclear as to what was going on, for instance, when the straight-haired girl seemed to be vying for the main character, then the main character was shown in bed with the curly-haired girl without explaining that the two were dating. But after awhile, it’s apparent that such things aren’t all that important… or rather, they become less important. The hanging-out-with-friends parts at the beginning give way to the tracking-down-criminals parts towards the end of the volume. I can’t say which I like better though, because I liked the bizarre casual social encounters from the early part of the volume a lot.

The murder mystery part towards the end of the volume is a little shorter than I thought it would be, though it is twisty enough and kind of brutal to satisfy my tastes in murder mysteries. It’s not at all a traditional murder mystery, but I’m not sure how to explain how it’s different, other than to say that the way the gangs of Ikebukuro are brought together while not at all explaining how or what exactly is going on sort of set it apart, and I kind of liked it for that, too.

With the way the volume wraps up, I can’t imagine what is in the other three volumes. It’s not spectacular about anything, and I think that has a lot to do with the total lack of character depth, re: the unexplained relationships. I don’t think I would be rushing out for the second volume if I didn’t already have it, especially since it seems pretty clear who the bad guy is at the end of the volume. But since I do have the next volume… I am a little intrigued.