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Description
From Mangascreener:
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.
Type
Manga
Related Series
N/A
Associated Names
虹ケ原ホログラフ 虹ヶ原／ホログラフ Das Feld des Regenbogens (German) Nijigahara Horogurafu Nijigahara/Horogurafu Rainbow Field Holograph
very strange, it's best if you read it if your head is really clear - if i was reading this yesterday i would probably be really pissed. but this is pretty interesting, its one of those things that has an ending that your content with, specially since this doesnt have a really straightforward plot - but it is a good read tho
Out of the 500+ odd titles I have read, this is the only one that has actually deserved a natural 10.
Nijigahara Holograph is a brilliantly told, but thoroughly unconventional story. The plot is sliced up the way it is in an effort to give a stronger connection to the character's mindset, which makes it more convoluted, but that's an intended effect. The characters themselves are having difficulty comprehending their lives, and the storytelling is designed to reflect that. It comes full circle flawlessly and actually resolves all the conflicts if you're willing to stop and think for a bit. What makes Nijigahara a mature story isn't the graphic nature of the content, but the resolution and meaning derived from it.
That said, it probably isn't a story for everyone. While I find it technically unparalleled and visually stunning, a person just looking to relax would probably find this irritating (though visually interesting.) Additionally, a lot of the symbolism is very distinctly Japanese in nature, and foreigners without a knowledge of it are going to have an even more difficult time comprehending the storyline, which I think has been causing a few problems here. If you don't like stories that make you sit down and sort your way through, you will not like this and frankly you shouldn't even be bothering to pick up this work in the first place.
I hate to mention this here, but CuthienSilmeriel's post bothers me a bit. You basically just said "short stories are bad because they are short and I can't connect to them." It's fine if you prefer something longer, but please don't attempt to make an objective judgment with that kind of criteria.
I hate this manga... too much violence toward women. Read this stuff too much make you become a sicko, losing hope, look at the world with the darken color glasses. Give me a break already! Have they ever try to look at the world from different angle 3/10 well for the art work, that is all to it!
its quite a thing to grip and it fool me several time... (asshole >< but once you get mid way and the end it explain a lot but some loose end that drive me to read it again.. but no i will leave it is as my first impression!
Read this in one sitting so while it started confusing things became much clearer by the end and I avoided back-tracking this way. While I agree that the themes and plot certainly make you think and the story is open to intepretation which makes it a good discussion topic I can't say this is the best I've ever read. The main problem is that it's so short I fail to have any kind of connection with the characters and consequently don't really care what happens to them. A fantastic idea but you remain an outsider ti the story rather than actually getting immersed in it.
Maybe you need to read it in one go to not get confused by the lack of chronological order. I don't feel like writing a long comment.
So, art's great. Beautifully realistic. Great backrounds. Perfect even. The story. I must say, to make up something like that is really quite amazing. Written in such a way, that doesn't confuse you (time-order wise). Everything else is creazy. Messed up characters that are greatly done.
The ending, the last page, was hard for me to understand. Got it though, with the help of fellow reader^^(thanks). Really good. *wants to kick the low-score commenters but is too sleepy*
I loved the setting of the world, I thought how it showed the brutality and unfairness of life was amazing. The characters were good. The art was beautiful, not to mention realistic, and the dialogue was intelligent. I liked the ideas put across. I loved how Suzuki viewed the world, and the overall feeling of hopelessness and despair. I loved how it was realistic, yet at the same time it manipulated reality and showed things that could have been supernatural, but what I assume was mearly the human imagination.
However this manga simply made no sense. The idea, as far as I could see, is outstanding however the execution was poor. It could have been amazing, if the story wasn't so all over the place. Put in chronological order, focusing on less people (there were way too many characters) it could have been very good. Perhaps make it longer too, so things can develop more. The ideas needed to be explored and explained more. The manga skipped about far too much, flicking from times and people till it didn't really make sense... at all. I don't mind being withheld details, as long as you can make sense or interpret what it there. This manga just has gaping holes, I'm unsure of how I should interpret it. I'm unsure what actually happened. It should have been put into order. Stopped with the random time warps.
It left an impression on me, as I said the dialogue is quite bleak but at the same time quite powerful. And so I reccomend the read. It's a shame though, it could have been something amazing if it had just made more sense. It had potential.
I find a lot of the posts about nijigahara to be fairly irritating. I'd remind those of you highly critical of this manga for being "too confusing" that manga is a medium, not a genre. Not every story has to be spoon-fed to you.
A lot of these same criticisms have been leveled at David Lynch for movies like Lost Highways and Muholland Dr. Well, If you haven't read this manga yet, and you hate Mulholland Dr., you're probably going to dislike this manga, because it requires a large amount of attention, thought, and yes, unless you have an eidetic memory, re-reading.
If you don't want to puzzle out the story for yourself, but still want to understand what happened, I'd suggest reading the amazingly comprehensive forum post about the plot. I'll give tokkun credit for going that far, but to complain that this manga doesn't have like a linear, easy-to-follow storyline, like, say, death note, is in essence a vote to stifle creative methods of storytelling, and an effort to steer ALL manga towards the repetitive pablum that 95% of it is today anyway.
I feel soooo disturbed right now, yet soooo willing to give the highest rating for mature contents being mature in, what I could only call, A+ pseudo-nihilistic childhood.
I read the entire manga in one stretch and found it to be highly confusing. Perhaps I'm one of the few who were unable to understand this story because I found it too experimental for its' own good.
It was like someone had taken a plot, sliced it up and threw the pieces into a mixer to form a story. And hell no, just because a manga has topics like rape, murder, etc. doesn't make it any more matured. Its' saving grace was that the art was very good and engaging but that doesn't make it any better.
(+19)
(-109)
3/10 well for the art work, that is all to it!
