Ranked #293

Nijigahara Holograph (Manga)

Nijigahara Holograph is a Seinen, Psychological, Mystery, Drama that will take anyone brave enough to read it, on a mind-trip. This is quite the experimental manga, as it delves into a realm that hasn’t been entered before, so you can expect to become lost in the intricate plot.

One of the trickiest things to explain, about Nijigahara Holograph, is the story & plot because it is hard enough to comprehend, let alone articulate it in words. The manga is like a montage of the lives of different people, who are all interconnected in some way. There are numerous themes but the ones most prominent are on the unfairness of life and the redemption that follows, upon choosing the right path. The story itself focuses on one troubled person at a time, giving the reader a peek in their lives and what they went through during their past elementary school days. This puzzling set-up certainly gets you thinking however the story has no flow whatsoever and is all over the place. It would have been better if events were in some kind of chronological order, yet you wouldn’t get the same experience any where else.

There are quite a lot of characters through the duration of this short manga but the three that leave the biggest impact are: Komatsuzaki (a violent guy who’s unpredictable actions seem to be directed by something), Suzuki (a troubled guy with disparaging views of those around him) & the girl that seems to be at the centre of it all Kimura (a sort of sacrificial lamb figure). All the characters face personal struggles, with the mental & verbal dialogue adding a whole new depth to each of them.

Unlike most seinen manga I have come across, this one goes for semi-realistic & semi-surreal artwork. That may not make much sense but having finely drawn characters & environments amalgamate with various entrancing imagery is truly mystifying. The artwork isn’t exactly made to look attractive, as it mainly expresses the writer's view of the imperfect creature that is humans.

Overall Nijigahara Holograph is an engaging manga that showed the brutality and unfairness of life. This manga is so surreal that you may find yourself staring at a page, wondering what it’s supposed to portray or what the butterflies are supposed to represent. This really isn’t a manga to enjoy but rather something to think about, by piecing bits of the story together. For those who are actually struggling to understand the thoughts that are being put across in this review would have no chance in comprehending this bizarre manga.

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I don't want to rate this because I still don't understand 20% of it but I've finally thrown away my idea that manga is only or people that are obsessed with manga. It has a few themes in common with far too many other stories from the same medium but for some reason was much more enjoyable (if you could call it enjoyable, it is most certainly not pleasant), perhaps because usually this kind of themed story is done in the form of a fantasy or one big metaphor whereas this story uses fantasy and metaphor only to tie things together. Characters that instead of alienating you with their impurities or having some kind of justification in the end, just make you feel dirty to be human. This is not a bad thing, it's amazing. It isn't easy to make the average reader look at humanity at its worst in the mirror and come to terms, hopeful that they'll be able to stick to the better side of human nature themselves and appreciating the beauty of lifes complexity regardless. Had I read this a few years earlier when I was more impressionable, I'd probably be completely obsessed with it but while it is definitely above average, I think I may have seen better in other forms of media (not manga, though I'm relatively new to manga).

I really like the way it fit together like a puzzle but I'd really appreciate it if someone could explain some stuff. Most of it, I had some guess as to what was going on. I was following perfectly up until the girl with the mask in the cafe, who is she? I also reaallllly didn't understand the relationship between Arakawa and the dude with the bad memory. I read it once in Japanese and once in English and those are the two things that I'm clueless about and something tells me they really effect the whole story.

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