Are you in the mood for a revenge story? Great, then this may scratch that itch! are you in the mood for a GOOD story? Then steer clear because this shit is hot garbage. I've read a lot of dumb stories but this one is just stupid.
Where do we even begin? Well, let's start with stuff we don't have to suspend our disbelief for. Like, yeah, it's ridiculous that five kids get away with literal murder like it's their hobby for their entire childhoods, but we can let that fly -- it's needed for the Story™. Yeah, it's pretty damn absurd that the female lead walks into the most obvious possibly rapey traps after being forced into a rapey trap by the plot, but that's all just to get you to see how Good the main character is...
But IS he good?!?!? How can he be Good... if he KILLS PEOPLE?!?!
This manga pretends to discuss the gray morality of humanity, all the while using the words "EVIL! EVIL! EVIL EVIL EVIL. PURE EVIL" to describe the antagonists, a bunch of kids who are, ahem, ...pure evil.
They kill a cat early on so that should show you that they're evil, because only evil people kill cats -- and EVILLER people kill cats AGAIN. What about three times? Might as well go for the tic-tac-toe of cat murder, right? Nakatake has you covered!
Putting aside the merits of using
animal abuse
as a plot device to convey the "evilness" of someone (as, in real life, it is a valid indicator of someone's moral compass, although it feels cheap and like a shortcut when used in storytelling), the story also outright tells you. They're evil. I looked in his eyes and I saw that he was EVIL! He didn't change, he's STILL evil. This means that murder is justified! Because, like, murder is cool when you're murdering a shithead.
That's the thing -- the manga is about killing shitheads. It's not clever, it's not smart, it's extremely simple and two-dimensional. Where this manga shines is with its torture scenes. They're graphic, gross, disturbing, mostly unique, and aptly karmic. But all the parts between the torture scenes are just extremely ham-fisted attempts at justifying the upcoming torture, usually by showing you how Evil a guy is. There might be a chapter or two where they lazily give you a quick reason why the guy became evil, but they don't actually try to flesh them out or make you feel complicated about the torture. You're supposed to revel in the torture, so why would they make the Evil guys feel human? They don't. So I'm not sure why they bother with quick backstory chapters that show you that actually this guy snapped because his friend made him build a clay robot and then his friend destroyed it so now because his friend was mean, he likes to go around raping people and killing things.
That's another thing -- all bad characters are rapists, animal abusers, etc. No gray morality. Just... clearly Bad People doing Bad Things getting their comeuppance. The only exploration of grayness is via the main character, the one performing the revenge killings,
as well as his grandfather, although that doesn't get dug much into either.
However, the manga seems to be overly obsessed with showing us how cool the main character is and how good he is at killing people, so as of chapter 102, it still hasn't actually conveyed meaningful sense of purpose. Obviously he's the good guy, he kills bad people! Killing is bad, but the bad people he kills are worse! Sometimes he
! fucks up and kills a good guy, but he does time and forgets about it anyway!
Some scenes are embarrassingly predictable, but what kept me -- and keeps me -- reading is the torture scenes. I had admittedly not seen
skinning via vegetable peeler or using the pear of anguish
in a manga before. I've consumed a fair amount of fucked up media so to be surprised by creative madness is still thrilling. One of the chapters had a torture scene similar to Clockup's Euphoria, which I'm rather impressed they got away with in a shounen manga.
And here's the thing. Yes, I think this is stupid as hell. But also? That's what kept me reading. This is about as much of a psychological thriller as Spongebob, but at least the latter tried to develop its female cast. The entertainment value of Juujika Rokunin is the absurdity
(dark web hitman requests websites? How archaic. Why go through the effort of downloading Tor when you could just have a private Twitter that people need to request access to before they can request their own personal murder?! #PleaseKillThisRapist)
and the creativity of its violence. If you're not into riffing or gore, there's nothing here for you. If you want a mindless revenge story, this might also be good -- just don't expect it to challenge you at all.
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