vignette00's manga / #death(27)

A journalist and his friend take it upon themselves to try to solve a series of supernatural murder mysteries in the first year of Meiji era Tokyo. What they end up uncovering is a family drama that manages to make the main characters doubt not only themselves but the very nature of truth and causality. Think of this as a weird cross between Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress, Ishiharu Satoru's "So wa Reirei no Yukini Mai" (a bl-lite mystery, http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/so_wa_reirei_no_yukini_mai/), and the criminally underappreciated "Summer of the Ubume" (http://www.mangago.me/read-manga/the_summer_of_the_ubume/). The culprit's identity was oddly obvious to me very soon in the story, but the twist that comes in the end is uniquely and fundamentally a product of Japanese literature and sentiment. The atmosphere is the star of the story, with its particular mix of fantasy, folktale, and unambiguous anxiety about modernity. In the end, what it reminds me the most of is a more adult and less emotionally wrought version of Kaori Yuki's "Count Cain."