Slightly Biased Manga

This!  This was the book I was looking for all those times I jumped randomly into a series!  It was so easy to get into (even with no summary or character profiles in the front), and I really enjoyed how well the simple stories were structured.  Even when some of the short chapters delivered background details on the characters and plot of the overall series, I had absolutely no problems following along.

The story focuses on Hiruko, a Baku, and the customers that come into his shop to be cured of their nightmares.  It follows in the tradition of such series, which include things like Pet Shop of Horrors, XxXholic, and Tarot Cafe.  The chapters are, for the most part, one-shot stories where a customer comes in, Hiruko inspects their dream, solves their problem, and the customer goes on their way and we see the repercussions of the nightmare play out.  They are simple, and they seem short because the structure is such that a lot is going on without being rushed, not a lot of information is crammed in, and Hiruko’s analysis of the nightmares is actually fairly interesting.

The first chapter seems pretty typical.  A girl comes in with a nightmare where she’s in the dark and being held back by a rope.  She can’t move forward even though she wants to, and is afraid to look at what’s holding her back.  Hiruko enters her dream and finds out she is in a circular hallway, and the one holding her back is her brother, who cries out for constant attention and makes the girl feel like she can’t live her life the way she wants to since she’s constantly taking care of him.  After Hiruko tells her she needs to make a decision, she leaves her brother to make her own choices.  Her brother comes to the shop a day or so later asking about his missing sister, and we find out that her choice was actually to commit suicide, and the brother tried to prevent her from doing so by acting sickly so that she would feel like she had a purpose in life.  Apparently the rope represented her first suicide attempt, where she tried to jump in a well but got caught in the ropes.  She made sure to cut them after Hiruko told her about it.

See?  It’s not really cheesy, and the imagery used in the dream and the outcome of the nightmare are always kind of interesting like that.  The stories are short compared to the other series I mentioned, but everything interesting and relevant is there, and nothing is rushed.  It’s extremely well put-together.

There’s a few chapters that deal with the overarching plot of the series, and one or two gag chapters that were surprisingly funny.  Hiruko lives in a Tea Shop with two other people, and another character is introduced later that acts as a rival baku.  The two at the Tea Shop aren’t all that interesting, but the female plays a role when the rival baku drags up Hiruko’s past and what happened to him and the baku that gave him his powers.  Hiruko’s story is an interesting one, and the format takes a form you wouldn’t really expect.

The only person that doesn’t seem to serve a purpose in this volume is the male occupant of the Tea Shop, but I found it hard to begrudge his presence since he’s the one that brings the humor.  In one chapter, he lit Hiruko on fire and seemed more concerned that he’d singed the baku cane than the fact he’d just roasted Hiruko alive.  Hiruko can recover since he’s not a human, but it was quite hilarious to see him wandering around as a singed corpse.

Also, the series hinges on the legend of the baku, a creature that dines on nightmares.  Hiruko is a baku, and he survives by providing a service and eating the nightmares of people that ask for his help.  Baku traditionally cause nightmares in order to dine on, which is what the rival baku does (he makes nightmares worse so that they will be tastier when he eats them).  Sadly, this is a story type that isn’t used very frequently in the manga I read, and the only other times I’ve seen it come up are in Mizuki Hakase’s one-shot short story volume Baku (which wasn’t very good) and in the 2nd Urusei Yatsura movie, Beautiful Dreamer.  Beautiful Dreamer is actually what I think of whenever baku come up, but then again I think about Beautiful Dreamer quite often, it is a wonderful movie.

This series took me very much by surprise.  I’ve had this volume sitting around for some time, and I’m glad I finally picked it up.  The one-shot stories are extremely engaging, the baku theme is an interesting one, and the occasional chapter of plot seems to indicate the story will eventually move in a very, very interesting direction.  While it isn’t absolutely spectacular, it’s probably worth picking up if you want a similar series to Pet Shop of Horrors or the early volumes of XxXholic.  And it’s easy to jump into without reading previous volumes, which is a huge plus.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.