Kieli: Shisha-tachi wa Kouya ni Nemuru
Kieli

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i fucking cried.

let me start this by saying i love every character, albeit their short screentime, as they’ve shown to be a refreshing and animated people but most of all, i love Kieli and Harvey. i adore our female lead, Kieli, a brave and spirited young girl who can sees the dead. to me, she captured the highlights of youth: her natural inquisitiveness, naivety, an all-encompassing kindness. meanwhile Harvey is our maladjusted and undying soldier created from the world’s past war. his guilt and sorrow within his carbonized heart grows as he watches his former friends and family pass away and left him alone, ... this immortal figure. as such, he wants to return his endless time to all the people he slain under the war (in a way, can be reminded of the ml from Rurouni Kenshin or even Gintoki from Gintama).

i enjoyed this series a lot as i adore the duality of this bond formed between these 2 lonely and downtrodden people by society: how heartbreaking and beautiful it can be at the same time. the way Harvey went from abandoning this cruel world to walking on yet another day because he knows Kieli will always accept him for who he is, despite his violent past, and accompany him from his suffocating phase of darkness is truly a delicacy.

"forever warm and gracious, he who bares his crude essence before this light of his and hopes to protect her for as long as she lives. for as long she is able to give meaning and joy to his world."

Enraptured, i turned pages after pages to see how Kieli went from a lonely orphan desparate for a connection to struggling throughout the journey and being able to call Harvey as her most precious connection and a source of warmth and protection.

if you like male lead who have no qualms of dying but ultimately being motivated by love, then Kieli and its better light novel source is worth checking out.

the almost apocalyptic setting can be bleak at times with its sprinkle of PTSD and colonical, murderous campaigns but the angst truly makes up the experience.

all in all, this short seven chapters have been a ride and i can’t wait to read the 9 light novels.

This review is for both volumns:
Kieli is a sci fi sort manga based on a book series. Basically, the story is about a girl who sees ghosts, that meets a boy that is not actually alive. The whole Kieli world is interesting, as it is kind of distopian and full of action. I liked how the story just had a smooth flow, and, even though the events were kind of easy to predict, the story was entertaining and full of action. The manga itself felt like those old school ones, especially the drawings. Finally, the one thing that just didn't work for me was the ... fact that the story was repeated at the begining of each chapter, which is just something that bothers me in every manga, but still I had to point that out.

The story starts out 15 years after a war that depleted the planets resources and a war that created a creature called the Undying. After the war though, the church went on a mass scale killing spree of the undying, much in the same way the Vatican got read of the Knights Templar if you want to link it to our history. In that sense, it makes the manga a bit more believable even if it is talking about the supernatural. It’s interested that before we are even introduced to Kieli, we are given a back story on this world they live on which isn’t ... earth, it’s a different planet they live on that the church founded itself on. Then it jumps to 80 years, and then another 7 to the time in which the story really does start.

I can see somewhat why Kieli is pretty much a outcast and I don’t think its just because she can see ghosts. She seems to also have a belief that is not the same as the teaching of the church that runs her home. A church with soldiers that will kill someone right in front of a mass amount of people, calling it a justified killing. Her grandmother seemed to try and protect her from them by telling her not to speak of seeing spirits and her beliefs but when her grandmother died, she was left in a care of a church boarding school.

Becca, her ‘roommate,’ sadly doesn’t stay throughout the manga. She is only there during the first chapter and it’s a very heartwarming story with her when she leaves us. A young girl who died from a train accident and then became best friends with a girl who never had any other friends. I could really feel for her and for Kieli when she is leaves.

Harvey on the other hand is a reanimated corpse, the Undying as they are fully called. He has to be very careful because of the church wanting to kill his kind so he seems a bit cold sometimes. Sometimes even, his hunted radio seems to have more tact then he does in the ways of people’s emotions. Even though, Harvey has a bit of a heart and does show some times where he is gentle to Kieli. Another surprising trait is that he is actually warm to the touch. Kieli actually talks about this at one point in the first book and yet, he is supposed to be pretty much a zombie.

The last person I have to talk about is Corporal. Corporal has no other name then his rank but he knows so much from the time before the church had so much power including different types of music and how to understand a persons feelings. I consider him somewhat a big brother or adult to Harvey and Kieli because he does seem to take interest in the two and care for them slightly. Becca called him an evil spirit when she first met him but I only see him as a spirit just trying to find a place to go. He does have a wicked temper at times that he shows in the first chapter but I have my suspicions that it was more on the line of trying to protect Harvey, even if in the flight of rage, he ended up hurting him.

The artwork is actually rather beautiful with large blotches of ink to show blood. The characters are rather detailed but don’t feel as though they stand out of their world. Even the ghosts look as though they are still alive most of the time except for Corporal when he is in his static form.

In the end, this is a very heartwarming manga that will probably make you cry.