Hikari no Machi

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Hikari no Machi/City of Light (2004–2005) is Asano Inio's third release and my second reading by this author (first one: Solanin, his next work). This manga certainly deserves a score stats of 8.0, 8.5 or as scored in my personal mangalist, 9.0. Why?

Have you ever played Jenga? It's simple: during the game, players take turns to remove a block from a tower and balance it on top, creating a taller and increasingly unstable structure as the game progresses.
Well, I can easily say City of Light is a Jenga Tower. One of the characters, Inspector Mizutani, even mentions that the buildings remind him of ... this toy. But not only physically, City of Light is a Jenga game happening right in from of your eyes. Jenga is derived from a Swahili word meaning "to build" and that's what you see the characters doing. They're building their lifes, doing what they can to survive in this world, removing the blocks and building a new structure to try reaching something above themselves... But if you keep removing the blocks from the bottom, this unstable new structure will eventually fall.

City of Light consists in 9 chapters, bringing many different stories. Some are regular slice of life, like a mangaka and his wife, two girls talking about random yet deep subjects and on. Others have more intense and heavy subjects, such as suicide, kidnap or murder and these are the most interesting ones, Tasuku and Hoichi's chapters. Still, all of the 9 chapters are necessary to create the City of Light environment in your head and all of them are connected to each other somehow. It's incredible how slowly you get into this city, knowing about the stories based on the character's opinion, you will easily hate this character in the first 1-4 chapters and then, love the same one on the last 5-9. There is no manichaeism describing the characters, "he is the evil one and she is the good one", all of them have done good things and bad things, all of them are humans, there's no villian, they're just victims of life, quoting Kurt Cobain: "Nobody dies a virgin... Life f*cks us all".

Carrying a realistic storytelling as well a realistic art style, City of Light tells us about the dark side of the humans, how far they can go to achieve something or how far they go just because they're bored. Shows how connected people are, how weak or strong bonds can be and how one's attitude changes the entire scenario.

You should give a try to City of Light if you are looking for a manga with a melancholic atmosphere and deep subjects. City of Light brings this bittersweet feeling, life is happening. "People staying, people going". The same Sun lights us all while we remove blocks from our own Jenga towers, balancing in insecure choices and building a unknown and unstable future.

It's a manga that has to be read and enjoyed slowly. There's something to ponder in every page, from the expressions on the characters' faces, to sentences that are in no way devoid of sense or used as a simple placeholder.

Bearing in mind all the questions that this manga raises in regards to the morality of some situations (e.g. assisted suicide, murder in the name of revenge), the answers would be strictly personal and it'd feel wrong for me to describe any of the characters as "bad" or "good". There's no "right" or "wrong" way to interpret or regard this manga, and you will most ... likely find yourself holding different opinions on the characters, than the ones you started out with.

And that, in my opinion, is a great technique sadly underutilized in manga: reminding the reader that people aren't defined just by a single personality trait or (more importantly) through a single point of view. Every character presents themselves as the "hero" of their story and is later shown through the eyes of other characters with varying moral compasses of their own. It is at these points that the saying "we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions" comes to mind.

Sometimes, the art looks messy - or rather unlike the clean, perfect characters you normally see in mainstream manga. Although slightly exaggerated, the characters in this look more on the normal side, albeit not as visually appealing as regular manga. All in all, the story is definitely the more important aspect, and I can let some art quirks slide in favor of it.

Story: 9 | Art: 8 | Characters: 10 | Enjoyment: 10 | Overall: 9

This review contains spoilers.

Hikari no Machi is a collection of short stories of characters who live in the city of light. Most of the characters are connected somehow and this is used to create a disparity in their points of views. There are also some stories that are completely isolated, which may or not add anything to the manga.

The story seems to be written by an edgy teenager. It tries to be mature by showcasing dark themes like suicide, violence and extreme neglectful parenting, but it comes out as childish when the plot is so bad written and the characters lack in realism. There are ... some pretentious philosophical texts mingled with the story to make it seems deep and try to make sense of all the mess in the story. Another point in which the story fails is being realistic. The characters reactions to the absurd events in the story and just how they act in general makes no sense from a realistic perspective. Examples of this are a boy showing no reaction as he witness many suicides and just casually take their phones after they die, a man who is always laughing and rambling about how he wants money and more money to buy the city, a girl who thinks she sees alien and a little boy who says he reincarnated.

The first story is about a mangaka. It shows his struggles as a creator, his relationships with friends and his girlfriend. It all seems wholesome and normal slice of life stuff, but there are already some pretentious nihilistic tendency in it of course, because it wouldn't be Asano Inio otherwise. When a girl commit suicide, the man muses on the matter and reaches the breathtaking conclusion that life must goes on, despite the girl killing herself... deep. The suicide scene connects with the next story, a boy who watches over people committing suicide and taking their phones right after it, the themes are really diverse here. This is the edgiest story, the hopeless boy who apparently doesn't care about anything is in love with another hopeless girl who passes her day waiting in a bus stop to take revenge against a man who attacked her. This is the typical romance in Asano's works, so not much to add on it. If you don't know the deal, it's two despondent, nihilistic kids who have love as their last resort, the point is to show that love can thrive despite everything and that anyone can experience it, no matter how messed up their lives is. When the girl finally meets the man who attacked her, it's exposed that she actually tried to fool him by pretending to be a hooker. The point here is to break apart the idealized image of the girl that the ingenuous boy had, this kind of scene is also another common trait in the author mangas, and also break for the reader the white and black perception, showing morally gray characters. As the main story is happening, there's a subplot of the boy's father, who went crazy after killing a person and losing his wife, being the reason why the boy is so messed up in the head. He finally regains sanity when he gets to know that his son is in danger. The message is that the crazy man loved his son all along and was just waiting for his time to shine. I have never seen this one before.

The next story is about two girls, one who seems to be mentally deranged and a normal one, for Asano Inio parameters, at least. The crazy girl says that she knows a place where she can see aliens, and the other one, doubting it, goes with her to verify it. Arriving there, they find nothing, and that's the end of this short story. There are some contrived dialogue between them to make it feign a philosophical meaning, but it's pointless, and the fact that those smartass dialogues are from kids is an attempt to hide the pretentiousness of it, but only makes things worse. After this little nonsense, it goes back to the man who assaulted the girl in the second story. Two hopeless men and a baby, one tries to thrive through crimes and the other by regular work. It was similar to the second story and was used to show the point of view of the man. The two characters here are too dense, so it's hard to care about them or their relationship, one is crazy and the other is oblivious. There are more dark themes like kidnapping, deserting and living through crimes. The moral of the story is that the bad guy who does the crimes just wants to buy the city if light for everyone to live happy, because he knows how the world is unfair and is going to save it.

The story is wrapped up with a little kid saying nonsensical things. But he must be correct, since every normal people is crazy as we witnessed during the story, or that's what the Asano wants to convey here. In the end of it all, the author throws some metaphors involving cats, reincarnation and afterlife to finish the groundbreaking masterpiece.

Despite being depicted to appears realistic, all the characters are insufferably stupid, wich makes it hard to relate or even have any sympathy for them. It's hard to know when the character has some real mental impairment, if they have mystical powers or are just extremely dumb, but it's fact that none of them is reasonable or could pass as real persons.

If you know Asano Inio's other works, you know how good his art is, and it's no different for this manga, the drawing is really good for most part. The only problem is the characters designs, as most of the characters are drawn to look the most ugly possible, despite the good art. Asano apparently has a rule that the people in his works cannot be beautiful and appealing. Maybe he is trying to make the manga realistic by using the excuse that most people are ugly in real life, even though the characters don't look like real people either, or maybe he wants to say his manga doesn't need to appeal with cute characters like all the shallow manga that are so successful, for his stories are so deep and so rich in meaning, who knows. That being said, this manga doesn't really have memorable panels like in his other works, so even the art couldn't save this one.

The only enjoyment you can find in this manga is pretending to be enlightened for reading one more deep and meaningful manga by Asano Inio and trying to look cool with the kids. The message that I get from it is "everybody is dumb and the world makes no sense". If you think that phrase is revealing or appealing for you, maybe you can enjoy the manga