Reviews

As someone said elsewhere, Freesia is a great manga for traumatized people. The level of enjoyment that you will get from this manga depends on your ability (and willingness) to relate to a cast comprised exclusively of various kinds of broken people, maniacs and madmen. If it’s not your cup of tea, then you will, probably, see it as a weak political satire on modern society, full of forced gibberish dialogues and illogical actions. If you can get in sync with the characters’ idiosyncrasies, than you’ll read it as a witty essay on the two most important searches, that any person conducts throughout its life – the search for the goal and the search for the balance.

Freesia doesn’t allow sane characters into its main cast: the trio of protagonists consists of a clinically insane guy, a psycho and an idealist. The lead character, Kano, is an unstable schizophreniac, who experiences hallucinations, delusions and memory failures on daily basis. He somewhat compensates for this with his ability to become invisible. (The setting isn’t exactly realistic and allows for some usage of ESP powers.) While technically the plot is organized around the cases taken by the vengeance killing company, that employs the three main characters, the author is more interested in the personal stories of the company's workers and their victims. The manga explores how people affect each other in both physical and psychic ways. (The revenge agency really isn't the point, I have no idea, why people focus on talking about it in legths in the reviews.)

The best part about Freesia is that it is not safe. It doesn’t embellish its characters, it doesn’t pity them and even their darkest moments are shown mercilessly, all with a great dose of dark humor. Be warned though that the manga contains large amount of gore and several rape scenes.

The art won’t be to everyone’s liking. It is not pretty and it doesn’t try to be. Though, if you’ve read some works by Nihei or are familiar with Dorohedoro you will, most likely, discover its appeal. The drawings are raw, unpolished and gritty, backgrounds are overloaded with details, faces are often oversimplified for the sake of expressiveness. The composition is superb. The art slightly changes from volume to volume: the first ones are a bit unpolished, the last two have slightly different tone to them.

Freesia has most of the features, characteristic of Matsumoto’s works – it is dark, dirty, satirical and twisted. But while some of his latest mangas seem to be style over substance, Freesia is still very focused and content-rich. It is a very mature and, in the end, very humane statement on the complicated art of living and on the way we have to fight constantly with the world in and around us.