Ikigami 1
Posted: June 10, 2010 Filed under: Ikigami Leave a comment »Motoro Mase – Viz – 2009 – 8+ volumes
Of all the series I wanted to go back to the beginning with, this is the one that needed it the least. All the volumes of this series stand really well by themselves, and as long as you read the back of the book and know the premise, the two stories per volume are basically one-shots.
The advantage to reading volume one is that we see where Fujimoto began to doubt his job and the worth of the Ikigami system. He is relatively ambivalent about it in the first story, but after a coworker is executed for expressing his disgust with the system, he is frightened by his job. It also doesn’t help that his first case wound up being a young man who decided he would get revenge on those who bullied him in high school, one of those cases where the person gets the Ikigami and goes crazy. To be fair, he had every reason to do so. Points to Ikigami for pointing out that he should have done it years ago, when something like that would have mattered and the bullies would have remembered him. That was the moral of the story, actually.
The second story is more sentimental, about a young man served with an Ikigami after ditching his musical partner in an attempt to get famous quickly. His career move was a lousy one, and he struggles, but he winds up going out with a bang in one of the most ridiculously sentimental scenes in this admittedly schmaltzy series. I usually like it, but not even I could really enjoy this second story by the end.
All the same, I do like this series. The release pace is just right for it too, since I don’t think I could do more than one volume at a time. It has an excellent premise, and I almost always enjoy the stories, but too much together will make me begin to doubt its raging sentimentality and probably ruin it.
