Kazuo UmezuBesprekingen
Auteur van The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 1
Besprekingen
Orochi: The Perfect Edition, Vol. 3 (3) door Kazuo Umezz
What starts out as a normal school day turns nightmarish - a mysterious event transports an elementary school and its grounds into a vast desert. The kids and teachers are left to figure out what's going on.
This book is pretty brutal, and gets violent quickly, almost to an absurdist level. It feels kind of like reading a fever dream. So many insane things happen to these kids, and throughout they're making all these adult decisions?? Meanwhile the actual adults lose it almost instantly. (You'd think teachers would care more about kids... right? WRONG.)
Despite that it hooked me and I was really invested in finding out what would happen to them, and why they ended up in a desert wasteland. The character development also improves rapidly - I hated the main character in the first couple chapters, but he improves a lot as the story progresses.
I definitely want to give the rest of this series a go.
Prodigy ~ 2 stars ~
A desperate man tries to rob the Watanabe family, but things go awry and the infant son of the family, Yu, ends up getting stabbed. Years later, the robber is in prison, and Mrs. Watanabe bullies and abuses Yu to study harder and harder so he can surpass his aloof father in intellect. No one acts like a normal person, but everyone's crazy motivations get explained in the end, though it's quite a slog through multiple outlandish developments getting there.
Home ~ 1 star ~
A man learns you can't go home again in this dull mishmash of the "It's a Good Life" episode of The Twilight Zone and The Children of the Corn with a godawful
Key ~ 2 stars ~
A little boy who lies all the time gets himself into "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" trouble. Too long, too dull.
In the first tale, "Sisters," she uses mind control of some sort to convince two sisters living in a big old house that she is their maid. She then watches them fall apart and turn on each other as they count down the days to the older girl's 18th birthday, a day when a family curse will cause her to start turning ugly.
In the second tale, "Bones," Orochi is posing as a nurse when she promises a grieving widow that she will resurrect her dead husband. It plays out in a wildly bizarre variation of "The Monkey's Paw."
The storytelling here is too outlandish and strange for my taste, with people who don't talk or behave like normal humans and a protagonist who is a cipher with undefined supernatural abilities. Despite that, I'll probably pick up the next volume if it wanders into my local library.
Thoughts: I enjoyed the initial premise and mystery behind this but wasn’t super impressed with the direction the story took. The illustration is well done and easy to follow but things just kind of went off the rails and didn’t make a lot of sense as the story continued.
The premise is that a whole elementary school disappears from modern day Japan and ends up somewhere “other”. There appears to be nothing but sand outside the building. As the school descends into anarchy because of panic-ridden adults (and some students) things begin to quickly collapse and the death toll rises to a staggering amount.
As I said above, I like the premise here but what I didn’t understand is what happened after the school ended up in the other place. Why were the adults going crazy and killing each other? Why were some of the students doing the same? Why did the adults suddenly get so violent with the other kids? Why were kids jumping off the roof convinced they were flying? There is a bit of hand waving explanation about people’s minds not being able to handle the change but it felt pretty weak to me.
I thought this was going to be more of a story about these kids and teachers exploring a new horrific world. I did not think they were all going to go nutty and be more of a danger to each other than any horrific landscape. They also spent nearly a whole book in this volume fighting a big bug thing which was just weird. I am going to give the story the benefit of the doubt and assume the giant bugs, madness, and general mayhem are actually a part of a larger cohesive story somehow…but by the end of this book I just felt kind of bored and mildly exasperated with the lack of any plot.
My Summary (3/5): Overall the initial premise is interesting and the illustration is well done and easy to follow. I was disappointed with where the story went though. I thought I was getting into some sort of horrific adventure and more it ended up being everyone just panicking and killing each other. I can only assume that the story gets more interesting in future volumes. Unfortunately, I won’t be reading those because these volumes are expensive and at least this volume is pretty much serving as a doorstop for me now…I have no desire to read it again. If you are into the whole people desperately killing each other in a school for no reason other than oddly unjustified panic, you might enjoy this more than I did.
Yikes.
Classically paced horror story, would make a great late night film showing. Some scenes truly scary, in that psychologically Japanese way. Overall fun to read though, no real surprises along the way.
This isn't a perfect comic: some of the twists are a bit hoaky, some of the dialogue is a bit awkward (probably a translation artifact). But there's so much to like about it: the story is genuinely surprising; the horror is both built up nicely and delivered frequently; the moral complexity is rich and gets you into an uncomfortable state of mind. (Always a plus with horror stories.) And best of all, Umezu's art is beautifully gothic. From the heavily inked shadows to the spookily matter-of-fact isometric rooms to the psychedelic touches, it's all a notch above similar manga, and very appropriate for the story.
After a furious row with his mother before heading off late to his school in Tokyo, Sho Takamatsu’s morning already isn’t going well. But it’s about to get a lot worse: as he arrives there’s an explosion, an earthquake, then something even more extraordinary occurs.
As they pick themselves up and dust themselves off, the school’s inhabitants realise they are alive and (for the moment) unharmed. But the school seems to have moved. Suddenly, appallingly, there’s nothing outside the school gates except a barren, trackless wasteland. Where has the school gone to? What happened to the rest of the world? And what happens now?
That it’s the adults who crack first under the pressure of its bizarre and brutal premise is just one of the things I love about The Drifting Classroom. By the end of vol. 1 the school’s teachers and other staff are already turning in panic on themselves and, mercilessly, their students. But traumatized or psychotic adults are *just one* menace that Sho and his schoolmates will have to face. To make it to the end of all eleven books of this story these unlucky young people will need to work together to survive starvation, disease, a succession of weird and terrifying monsters – and each other.
The Drifting Classroom was first published in Japan (to instant acclaim) in the 1970s, but while reading it I couldn’t help thinking about two real events that had occurred just a couple of decades before. Writer/artist Kazuo Umezu was born in 1936: when he was the age of the children he writes about in this story he, too, witnessed living cities being suddenly and brutally replaced by poisonous wastelands when the USA dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
I can’t give The Drifting Classroom a straight recommendation: parts of the story seem sudden and random, and the constant parade of hardships its young characters are forced to endure (OK, so what’s going to go wrong for them now? -No! That, too? You’re KIDDING!) sometimes made the reading experience tip over, for me, from tragedy and horror into camp and farce. But whenever I came close to giving up on this series something brilliant always pulled me back. As with some classic old horror movies, if you can look past the wonky bits of The Drifting Classroom you’ll find a wild and audacious story, packed with moments of jaw-dropping amazingness that this reader, at least, has never seen anywhere else. The context, outside the story, for the stoic way Sho and his friends face their tribulations adds a fascinating extra dimension. Well, it does for me anyway. ;D
A brilliant start to a bizarre, complex, science-fiction horror story.
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