I really enjoyed reading it, it's a promising new sci-fi manga series.
It is really well drawn, I absolutely loved the artwork. ( )

A sad sack salaryman's life sucks until a dramatic event turns his life around: he adopts a shelter dog. Before the incredibly cute dog can completely fix things, though, the guy also gets super powers, at which point we get a delightful rehash of TV "Greatest American Hero" in a mash-up with the dark superhero movie "Chronicle." Inuyashiki is a 57 year old guy who looks to be 10 to 20 years older, but despite the emotional beating he has taken from his long, unappreciated life, his first instinct is still to help his fellow man even if he isn't very good at it and ends up taking a physical beatdown. That makes him a terrific hero in my book. ( )

Sometimes we’re behind the curve. Sometimes we don’t read the manga or watch the anime when everyone else is talking about them. Bu sometimes we finally catch up and actually read the series we’ve been aiming to for years! Inuyashiki Vol. 1 by Hiroya Oku is a science fiction story set in the near future.

Inuyashiki is about Ichiro Inuyashiki, an older gentleman whose family doesn’t appreciate him and is dying of cancer. After an odd encounter in a nearby park, he wakes to find that his body has become robotic. His memories and thoughts remain the same, but everything else is mechanical. Somewhere else in the city the teenage boy named Hiro Shishigami finds the same. Both have to cope with their new bodies, what this means for them, and how they will move forward.

It is rather rare to find a manga about an older gentleman, so I was instantly intrigued by the nature of the main character alone. Inuyashiki is beginning to get along in years and is unappreciated and largely ignored by his family. This is a man who is alone despite being surrounded by family, and must face the prospect of his illness by himself. He is a rather pitiable character, one who is easy to connect to in a lot of ways, and someone I wanted to see succeed.

Inuyashiki changes through the volume. After an odd experience in a nearby park, he realizes that the majority of his body has been changed. Organs, muscles, bones, everything, has been replaced with robotic components. No knowing who he is or how do mentally or physically deal with these change, Inuyashiki sets out for answers.

This volume wasn’t a fast paced, but it didn’t feel slow, either. It is very much a close look at Inuyashiki, his life, his family or lack thereof, and his mental state. Is he human? What happened to him? He isn’t ill anymore, but what does that mean moving forward? There are a few more action oriented sections as well, perhaps a glimpse of what we can expect further into the manga.

There are many small moments in this manga that I really appreciated and felt true to life. For example, the mother asking her daughter to fix the television when all of the channels begin showing the same thing was great. More of these appear in the last chapter of the manga. Here we are introduced to the second main character, a teenage boy named Hiro who was caught up in the same incident as Inuyashiki. I enjoyed all of the references to various manga and the enthusiasm Hiro talked about them with.

The art in this manga is very clean, in a sense. There is very little stylization here. Everything looks rather realistic. Backgrounds are typically highly detailed, and the few pages that are colored look especially beautiful. However, character’s faces don’t show a great deal of emotion regardless of the situation they might be in. While this might fit in with the more realistic way the manga is drawn, I can’t help but wish there was a little more emotion in the art.

However, there was one section that was simply unbelievable. After an altercation in a park, several people are left wounded but alive. I rather liked the scene overall – the excitement, the fear of the characters, Inuyashiki trying to figure out how to use his robotic body – but there was one part that I just had to questions. Despite being hit by a rain of bullets, several characters leave largely unscathed, the logic of which I found questionable. However, that is only a small gripe for an otherwise very strong start to a series.

Inuyashiki Vol 1 by Hiroya Oku is a great beginning to a science fiction story set in a contemporary world. I’m very interested in seeing where the story will lead. There is no obvious overarching plot thus far, at least nothing past ‘trying to live normally when your entire body has been replaced by robotic counterparts’, and I’m interested to see what develops next. On to Volume 2 it will be!

This review and more can be found on Looking Glass Reads. ( )

Inuyashiki is a 58-year-old man who is unloved by everyone in his life. When he moves his family to a new home, all everyone does is gripe about it - how small the place is, how cheap he is, etc. He has a young son and teen daughter, both of whom are embarrassed by how old he is. They also don't respect him and don't bother to hide this fact. When Inuyashiki proposes that the family get a dog, no one will come with him, so he ends up selecting a Shiba, Hanako, on his own. It seems that Hanako is the only being in the world that Inuyashiki has to live for, until one fateful evening, when he and a teenage boy end up forever changed.

I picked up the first couple volumes of this in a Humble Bundle a while back. There's Humble Bundle with more volumes of this and other series up right now, and I'm still debating whether to get it.

This first volume of Inuyashiki didn't leave me wishing I had more in my collection. The characters were, for the most part, horrible. I doubt any of the people in Inuyashiki's family ever genuinely loved each other, and the world of this series seemed to be entirely populated with bullies. The only character I even vaguely liked was the dog, and something about this series makes me suspect that the dog isn't going to make it through the whole thing.

The artwork definitely wasn't to my taste. There was something slightly unsettling and repulsive about it, even before Inuyashiki discovered that there was something strange going on with his body. Maybe this was intentional, but the result was that I didn't really want to spend more time than necessary looking at pages and panels.

The sci-fi aspects were weird and a little hand-wavy. The goals of the beings Inuyashiki and Shishigami, the teenage boy, encountered were never stated outright, but they seemed to want to avoid causing a stir, or perhaps to avoid affecting humans with their appearance too much. Either way, they failed miserably, and their failure seems likely to grow more pronounced in later volumes.

I'm really not impressed with this series so far.

Extras:

Two pages of translation notes.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) ( )

I got a copy of this to review through the Amazon Vine program. This was a well done and intriguing start to a new manga series. I ended up really enjoying it and being very curious about what will happen next.

Inuyashiki’s life is pretty awful. Him and his family have just moved into a new house, but he obviously gets no respect from them. He looks very old for his age and this translates into him not getting respect in a lot of areas in his life. His only joy is a small dog that he adopts. Then things get even worse, he’s diagnosed with stomach cancer and only has a short while to live. His luck takes a strange turn when he is struck by light one night, light that explodes everything around him...yet he emerges strangely unharmed. As time goes on Inuyashiki finds out that he may not be as unchanged as he thought.

This is a strangely compelling story. It starts out like a pretty basic seinen and then towards the end gets very sci fi. Inuyashiki comes across as somewhat pitiful, yet is very compelling as a character and lends the story a strangely melancholy, yet hopeful, feel. His canine friend is very cute.

The manga is really well drawn, has a lot of detail and is easy to follow. I enjoyed the illustration and found it very engaging. The look at Japanese society in these pages is a fairly bleak one; there just aren’t a lot of nice people or characters in the story.

The story takes some truly crazy turns and towards the end things have gotten very interesting. I would love to talk about this more in the review but it would include major spoilers...so I won’t.

Overall a very engaging and interesting manga. It’s starts off as a seinen about a middle aged man who leads a somewhat pitiful and aimless life, but ends up being a story with some crazy science fiction aspects to it. I would definitely recommend and am incredibly curious as to where this story is going. ( )