Ikigami 2

Motoro Mase – Viz – 2009 – 7+ volumes

Wow, this was fantastic.  Much better than I thought it was going to be.  For some reason, I caught a supernatural detective vibe from it, even knowing it was about a society where a person is randomly selected to die in order to act as an example of why life is precious.  I think I naturally assumed the plot would run to the main character (who is the bearer of bad news for the unlucky) helping the victims to escape and live.  It’s not that at all.  It’s about how different characters in the one-shot episodes value their lives and how they choose to live their last day (the notice comes 24 hours before they will expire due to a drug in their system, injected during childhood into the entire population but only actually killing 1 in 1,000).

I was sold by the time I finished this volume.  There are two episodes, and while the first one was fascinating, I nearly teared up at the second episode.  The first was about a young man who had been working his way up from the bottom of the food chain for the chance to be a director.  When he finally gets his chance, he gets into a fight with his girlfriend, who is upset over his drug use.  Then the death notice comes, and the young man begins to appreciate all the things his girlfriend has been nagging him about over the years.  It had more of a taste of the cautionary tale than I like, but there was a little twist in the middle that I did not see coming, and the relationship between the girlfriend and the young man, along with all the fights and feelings they had together, were spot-on.  I enjoyed reading it, but it didn’t quite sell me on the series.

The second episode features a younger boy who dropped out of public school after junior high and decided to be a nurse at a nursing home.  Everyone there constantly scolds him, and he can’t seem to do anything right, but he feels that he is doing something worthwhile with his life, especially when one of the problem patients starts opening up to him.  Then his death notice comes.  The difference between the two stories was probably that this was a more sympathetic character, a young boy who felt he was finally touching lives when the old woman started talking to him versus a drug-addicted young man who wants to direct films.  Both are dreams in a way, I suppose.  The other difference is that the young boy didn’t have a girlfriend or anyone else to depend on, so the story took a look at the counseling the government provides for victims.  The counseling had a strong impact on the main character of the series, the man who delivers the death notices, but the method of counseling someone who will be dead the next day didn’t really strike me until the end of the story, where the counselor admits to her true methods.

I loved it.  I’m curious to see the paths that all these stories will take, and how many different types of people will work their way through the last day of life.  It’s an interesting premise, and I’m happy to see that it sticks to the main theme instead of trying to overthrow the system or something like that.

It also reminded me a lot of The Embalmer, by Mitsukazu Mihara.  I like both for different reasons… but then again, part of The Embalmer takes place in Pittsburgh, so I think I have to give the “series with a main character who works in death used as a framing device for short stories about coping with death” award to that one, for now.  But the short stories in Ikigami are a bit more developed and emotionally striking.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.