Now, be it far from me to be upset with a work for challenging its audience - I have no problem with having to think while I read - but there's a fine line between a work asking its readers to think and a work being so needlessly confusing you'd need a flowchart to figure out what the heck is going on. I don't have a low enough faith in my understanding of graphic novels to assume that "Oh, well, I just don't get this because it's too deep for me." I think that for most of the people passionate enough about manga or graphic novels to be reading this review have enough of an understanding of the craft that its time to dismiss such flawed logic. While I don't believe a reader has to baby their audience, I think a certain amount of responsibility for making an understandable script does indeed fall on the author. This is a very unpopular opinion, it seems, but I firmly believe guiding a reasonably intelligent audience through a narrative is as much a skill as any other aspect of storytelling.
Nijihara Hologram is a collection of interwoven stories throughout the lives of a group of characters living near a cursed underpass, and Asano-san chooses to have these stories told by randomly bouncing between them out of sequence. (According to the back of the book, we're also bouncing between timelines, but I didn't sense that in the actual story in the slightest.) Stories told out of order to reveal certain facts later or follow a certain emotion can be interesting, but Hologram seems to bounce around without any rhyme or reason, creating no narrative or emotional arc. From what I could grasp of the story, nothing would have been lost by telling everything in order, or at least telling each character's full story before moving onto the next one. Seeing as the scrambling of narratives adds nothing for the reader, the entire story reeks of this pretentious attempt at being more artistic by dropping everything into a blender.
The only reason I gave Hologram as high of a rating as I even did is half because the art is wonderful, and half because if you don't try to tie the stories together, each of the segments has its own interesting emotional baggage and inklings of a story.
It's clear that Asano-san knows how to tell a gripping story, but Hologram is marred by a superfluous attempt to make it seem more meaningful by making it impossible to understand.
