Watashi (Kari)
My Tentative Name

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Considering this manga has a full official English release, I found it strange that its MAL page is so empty. For that reason, I will leave a review.

My conclusion is that this manga is worse than mediocre. This review will contain spoilers, but the manga is so short that if anything about the synopsis interests you, you might as well read it.

The first few chapters were promising. It had a tone to it that made it unique and set it apart from other manga, reminiscent of many of those Japanese horror RPGmaker games. This is a result of Okutsu leveraging the art style in many ... scenes. The inking is sketchy, with very dark lines, and many pages would have a very smeared appearance that was unsettling to look at. It's rare and genuinely impressive for imagery in manga to be unsettling without resorting to gore and body horror. One page had the main character with a scribbled face juxtaposed against the otherwise usual art style. This is all to say that the art made me optimistic about this manga. A mystery with a psychopath of a protagonist and unsettling art that would deliver said mystery with a horror tone. This did not end up being the case. The artistic quirks that Okutsu incorporated were lost partway through the first volume. Even if they persisted, they wouldn't have elevated the mediocre story.

The story begins with the main character, Iori, waking up with amnesia and a dead girl in his washroom. I find amnesia a particularly lazy plot device, so from the start I was unimpressed. During the exposition, we learn that the true protagonist, Hirama, is the one who killed the girl in Iori's washroom. She did so because she wants to be Iori's girlfriend, and took advantage of Iori's amnesia to kill his current girlfriend and take her place. The story then follows a very typical amnesia plot, where Hirama discovers who Iori truly is. Iori never regains his memory until the end of the story, so this truly is the meat of the story. Predictability is a death sentence for mystery. The story leads us through a gang, murders, drugs, and the climax of the story and the origin story for Iori ends up being a cannibal cult. These are generic, yes, but there are two other large issues with the course of this story.

The first is that the events in each part contribute very little to the mystery at large. The story gets sidetracked, Hirama plays at an arcade, she pretends to join a gang, she has a match with a genius computer girl. None of these things contribute to the underlying mystery of Iori. From the exposition, we already know that Hirama is a psychopath, but her murders and threats stop a short while into the story. Light-hearted scenes like her playing games make her seem sympathetic, and her taking down the cult at the end makes her seem heroic. One could argue that these contribute to her characterization, but it's made clear that Hirama never stops being a psychopath in the end, and she doesn't grow as a character at all. These "side quests" are simple distractions, and make the story that much more of a slog to read through.

The second issue with this structure is that the few bits of the plot that contribute to the greater mystery are predictable to the point where the reader can very easily figure out Iori's backstory from the few details that are given from the start. While it's generally a good thing if a mystery is told in a way that lets the reader decipher it for himself, a reader will figure out this mystery because of typical plot devices and cliche, rather than a careful interpretation of clues from the author. In fact, I doubt Okutsu even planned all the details of the story from the start. There is a scene that illustrates my point, where Hirama and a couple of gang members explore Iori's condo, finding washbasins in strange places throughout the place, eventually uncovering a tub hidden underneath the floorboards. Said washbasins are not present in the exposition when the condo is first shown to the reader, nor are they present in any other scene the condo is in until this one. While the story refuses to reveal the purpose of these washbasins, cannibalism will no doubt be one of the first things on any reader's mind. It's predictability that makes this mystery a slog to read, and the plot itself is not interesting enough to hold up in the mystery's absence.

The tone is all over the place. Avengers director Joss Whedon famously believes that a grim, dark story ought to have a joke here and there. I despise this take, and I believe it commonly destroys stories. This applies to Watashi (Kari). While it may be "funny" that Hirama is an expert at fighting games (debatable), the "joke" is completely out of place here. The entire scenario of her being at an arcade to begin with is out of place. Humor isn't entirely unwelcome in a story like this if done right, but spending entire chapters on these "side quests" is a huge blow against this manga, as short as it is. Furthermore, the purpose of humor in a dark story is to provide the reader with some relief between the grimmer moments. Humor can provide contrast, and make grim moments grimmer. This story does not have nearly enough dark moments for humor to add anything of value. The story also practically changes genre, as Hirama plays a high-stakes game with a little genius girl. Were this Kaiji, perhaps this would be entertaining, but here it suffers from the exact same issue of wasting many of this manga's precious forty chapters.

This manga has no true characters. The "characters" we see do not grow in any meaningful way, even by the end of the story. Iori regaining his memory isn't a character moment but a plot moment. Kei cuts her hair but the uselessness that she beats herself up over before doesn't go away. As I stated before, Hirama never changes as a person. Every character in the story is introduced with a quirk: a psychopath, an innocent and sweet girl, an obsessive gamer, a child genius. But when a character doesn't change or grow, they cannot be called a character. What they are is a plot device. That's every character in this story. There is no satisfaction in seeing Iori regain his memory, as he is not a character but a plot device. This is made doubly true considering the story revolves around him despite how little time he is actually given.

This leads me to a final point. This manga has far too many characters; a very common trapping that plagues many manga. Watashi (Kari) is only four volumes long, arguably barely enough to thoroughly develop even a couple of characters, let alone the number it has. Given its length, a character-driven story is simply out of the scope of this manga, even if Okutsu intended it.

I believe that if Okutsu had put a hard introspective focus on only a couple of characters, done away with the "side quests", leveraged the art style, and kept the style and tone from the early chapters, Watashi (Kari) would have been a much higher-quality work. But as it stands, all I can say is that the early chapters tricked me intro reading a generic mishmash of cliche story beats and stagnant characters.