Sunday, Mar 4th, 2007
Asano Arrives
I have long been a follower of Inio Asano, ever since his debut work,
What a Wonderful World. Asano quickly established himself as a master of the young adult mentality with his depictions of formerly freewheeling youths fighting to maintain a semblance of identity and creativity within the cold, disillusioning world of adult society. Through
City of Light and
Solanin he refined his style and art, channeling the random splashes of story in WaWW into ever more vivid and powerful statements. But nothing in any of his previous works could fully prepare readers for what came next. Today, it is with great pride that I present to you the entirety of
Nijigahara Holograph.
Nijigahara (Rainbow Field, a location within the manga) is a heavy book. Its thick black cover and roughly 300-page girth are a sign of things to come: this is a black, bleak story, complicated and convoluted. It is a story that you can read again and again, and notice new things each time. It is a story that you need to read again and again to puzzle together. It is a story heavy with symbolism and maddeningly intricate.
Suzuki is a troubled boy. He's lived with uncaring foster parents for most of his life, alienated from the other kids at his school, owner of a cynical, unhappy mentality. Komatsuzaki is a violent, unpredictable bully whose head trauma causes him to act in mysterious, inexplicable ways. Arakawa is a no-nonsense, normal girl who pines after Komatsuzaki but can never have him. A teacher with just one working eye. A mother who committed suicide. A daughter in an endless coma. Attempted rapes, murders, extortion, sexual deviance, and a freakish explosion in the butterfly population. All of these elements are whirled together in a story spanning 10 years, a tale of blackness, pain and apocalypse. And maybe just a bit of hope and redemption. It's a spiritual cross between the misanthropic suburban malevolence of Kyoko Okazaki's Rivers Edge and the eerie mysticality of Donnie Darko.
I'm not only proud that we got the chance to present such a work to you, I'm also proud of the end result. Our old channel regular and pal bukuwawa scanned and edited the entire book by himself, but you wouldn't guess it was the first time he'd ever done either. He and I had several rounds of quality checking to make it looked and read as perfect as possible, and I believe the results will show this.
Do enjoy, and spread it to as many people as you can think of. This is a book that demands to be read.
NIJIGAHARA HOLOGRAPH TORRENT
poster: stephenpaul
