As I was reading these stories, I was thinking about how incredibly hard it would be to find anything like them here in the USA. Over here we "medicalize" depression. That's a reasonable approach to the problem, because it makes depression seem like an unnatural intrusion into the orderly march of life, and so conveniently blinds us to the frightening fact that despair is always an option for us. For the characters in these stories, though, despair is just around the corner! Apparently in Japan lots of people come to know that fact firsthand, especially when they're young and don't yet really fit anywhere in the world they are growing up to confront.

These aren't stories that fit anywhere in the familiar manga categories, but they're good stories, because they're about a part of life that's as real as the good parts.

Hikari no Machi/City of Light (2004–2005) is Asano Inio's third release and my second reading by this author (first one: Solanin, his next work). This manga certainly deserves a score stats of 8.0, 8.5 or as scored in my personal mangalist, 9.0. Why?

Have you ever played Jenga? It's simple: during the game, players take turns to remove a block from a tower and balance it on top, creating a taller and increasingly unstable structure as the game progresses.
Well, I can easily say City of Light is a Jenga Tower. One of the characters, Inspector Mizutani, even mentions that the buildings remind him of this toy. But not only physically, City of Light is a Jenga game happening right in from of your eyes. Jenga is derived from a Swahili word meaning "to build" and that's what you see the characters doing. They're building their lifes, doing what they can to survive in this world, removing the blocks and building a new structure to try reaching something above themselves... But if you keep removing the blocks from the bottom, this unstable new structure will eventually fall.

City of Light consists in 9 chapters, bringing many different stories. Some are regular slice of life, like a mangaka and his wife, two girls talking about random yet deep subjects and on. Others have more intense and heavy subjects, such as suicide, kidnap or murder and these are the most interesting ones, Tasuku and Hoichi's chapters. Still, all of the 9 chapters are necessary to create the City of Light environment in your head and all of them are connected to each other somehow. It's incredible how slowly you get into this city, knowing about the stories based on the character's opinion, you will easily hate this character in the first 1-4 chapters and then, love the same one on the last 5-9. There is no manichaeism describing the characters, "he is the evil one and she is the good one", all of them have done good things and bad things, all of them are humans, there's no villian, they're just victims of life, quoting Kurt Cobain: "Nobody dies a virgin... Life f*cks us all".

Carrying a realistic storytelling as well a realistic art style, City of Light tells us about the dark side of the humans, how far they can go to achieve something or how far they go just because they're bored. Shows how connected people are, how weak or strong bonds can be and how one's attitude changes the entire scenario.

You should give a try to City of Light if you are looking for a manga with a melancholic atmosphere and deep subjects. City of Light brings this bittersweet feeling, life is happening. "People staying, people going". The same Sun lights us all while we remove blocks from our own Jenga towers, balancing in insecure choices and building a unknown and unstable future.

La única palabra para describir este manga es "EPIC", especialmente la historia de la parada del autobús, es simple y complicada a la vez es simplemente increíble, todo el manga es único desde su estilo de dibujo hasta los temas a tratar

This is Asano Inio's third series after Nijigahara Holograph and Subarashii Sekkai. It's a good story in the vein of his first manga and definitely a step-up from it. This time the stories are a bit bigger and therefore fewer. Unlike Subarashii Sekkai, which was quite random, in Hikari no Machi the stories are centered within a district where the characters' activities can be linked more easily and logically to each other. As for the contents: misunderstood teenagers, strange parents, pressed mangakas, slice of life topics etc. Just like SS but presented more maturely and less annoyingly.

The second story will irritate you, but all in all, this single volume is definitely worth reading - especially if you're an Asano Inio fan. The progress from the immature and random Subarashii Sekkai can definitely be seen - we see the inception of Asano Inio's style: unique art, funny randomness in the actions of some characters, his ability to easily depict everything like a photograph. That being said, this is still an inception of his style, a style which we'll see more clearly in his next, much better work, Solanin.

... Last updated on August 28th, 2011, 6:51am