Reviews

Eleven years ago Arie Kimura, a young girl bullied by her classmates, fell down a well. As a result of her injuries she has been in a coma ever since. She told a story about a monster that lived in a tunnel along the Nijigahara embankment that would bring the world to an end, which terrified the other children. Arie’s accident is only one small part of an ongoing pattern of fear and violence. It isn’t a pleasant memory for anyone involved. Her friends, classmates, teachers, and family members have continued living their lives, but even more than a decade later they still can’t escape their pasts and the consequences of their actions. Some of them live in denial while others have tried to move on and to forget, but for some that is a complete impossibility. They have no choice but to remember, tormented with the knowledge of the suffering and pain caused by the unnecessary tragedy. The story of the monster in the tunnel may be more real than any of them could have imagined.

Nijigahara Holograph is a dark and unnerving story leaving us disconcerted. It deals with some very plump motifs, involving incest, abuse, suicide, and violence along with many other momentous subjects. Rather than sanitizing or romanticizing the story, Inio decided to fabricate an uncompromisingly harsh disquieting story in which all of the said elements are blended and knitted. This is one of the most embroiling story that springs back and forth between the events of the past and the present. The present story is heavily based on the dark intertwined events that had happened in the past and throughout the manga we can see the results of the doings of the past. The contemplated results are hazy and vague due to the deficit close attentiveness, and thus making it compelling to plough through the dark and entangled story. It is interesting to ascertain the bearing each character has with the other character. At the start nothing of this is clear, in the end they all cross each other’s path in life in an unimaginable way. Quoting, “The butterflies separated by fate are becoming one.”

The characters and the story as frightening and vexing they are, the manga is phenomenally interesting and engaging, by portraying both beautiful and brutal notions. Nijigahara Holograph is astonishingly involute and well layered---the characters, their past, their lives, and the stories that connect and overlap with each other’s, oft-times in unforeseen and surprising ways. The emotions and the milieu of the story strengthened with the artwork. Visual indications are embraced throughout the manga which chain the portrayal together, drawing upon the semblance between the character's emotions and situations. The parallelism found in the artwork and the story of Nijigahara Holograph are marvelously effective, underscoring the ever increasing sense of despair as the characters are caught in a never ending cycle of anguish and misery.

Nijigahara Holograph sepulchers deep symbolism and philosophy. The story is open to sundry interpretations as its ethereal uncertainty makes it difficult to condition how much of the story is real and how much of it is simply the product of impaired persona of the characters. The possibility that it shows the characters’ reality is terrible to contemplate, thus making it passable even if it was a rendition of purgatory. Inio Asano creates a cold, volatile, intense world to present us the quandary, what if the menace of the horror is internal? How would you escape from the menace, but leaves us on our own to create answers. Quoting one of my friend, “However what's interesting is that the thematic representation can be interpreted in various ways. It can be interpreted from the point of view of an idealist, nihilist, romanticist or a realist and all the viewpoints will make sense, which truly provides an artistic feel to the manga.”