The manga opens by instilling in the reader a feeling of distrust of the police, powerless in some cases beyond the reach of the law, where doing justice to the victims seems an unattainable end, thus causing malfunctions and abuse.
And that’s where Dan comes in, taking care of the unpunished in his own way.
The first case presented involves an assassin, Souzen Yoshi, clearly inspired by the terrifying crimes actually committed by “the Otaku assassin,” Tsutomu Miyazaki. In fact, he kills two girls at the age of 16 and sends the remains of the corpses to their families. He serves 18 years in prison and once outside, as a free man, he presents himself repentant in a television lounge in a disgusting script, in an attempt to receive forgiveness from public opinion. The truth is that he is not really sorry, is satisfied remembering what he has committed, would do it again and refuses to apologize to the families of the victims. In addition, mocking the people around him, he concludes an agreement with a publishing house to write a book about his life. And this is where Dan comes into action who performs, as he calls them, one of his “good deeds”: he finds him and subjects him to the same suffering he has inflicted on his victims.
And this is how the manga goes on, episodically structured and with the absence of an horizontal plot (at least for the 5 volumes released so far): always with the same modus operandi, in the most disparate situations and occasions, Dan finds his victims - people capable of all treachery, dangerous to society or criminals who escaped justice - and as the title suggests, he kills them brutally.
He repeatedly claims not to do it out of revenge, but for himself, to admire satisfied the desperate face of executioners when subjected to atrocities similar to those they have inflicted on others. The arrogant side of Dan will soon show up: always confident, he will commit murder after murder following his own moral code.
The protagonist feels joy in what he does and in feeling omnipotent, in being in control of justice. Those who he kills are criminals, which makes it easy for him to justify his actions and be at peace with himself because, after all, they deserved it.
Given his abilities, he is considered affable and reliable in the workplace, he is esteemed by everyone for his charisma. In the eyes of the reader, despite the awareness that the actions he performs do not make him very different from the terrible people he kills, with his sometimes eccentric ways he is almost fascinating: the tic in the eye, the hobby (if it can be called that) of pottery, his almost comic passion for the film “The Exorcist” (to which many references are made) and the gestures with which he performs wicked actions.
In fact, the authors do a great job of presenting human scum of all kinds, selectively highlighting only the most disgusting aspects of their being and effectively eliminating any possibility of empathizing with them or feeling sorry, so that the reader can’t wait Dan enters the scene to give them what they deserve.
Dan with his duality is an enigmatic character, he will not get lost in ruminations about life and death, right and wrong, and the narrative in this sense is not weighed down: in a curiously simple way he does what he has to do, without being verbose about it.
I would venture to call the protagonist a better Light Yagami, or at least in my opinion more engaging. Still, only some vague clues have been provided about his past, so a more detailed psychological introspection is missing, but considering how the story started, for now it’s not bothering at all.
Clearly a manga of this kind cannot be free from flaws, even quite relevant onesband which can be more or less compromising depending on what you’re looking for in a story with an antihero as the protagonist. Regardless of similarities with other works, for now the plot has simply been: “Dan finds people and kills them brutally”, the last victim is the number 76, so it’s natural to ask questions such as: is it possible that no one notices it? That he is never caught?
To make it more credible, in the first chapter Dan himself says that there are many people who disappear every year: “no one will ever come looking for you”, thus making it plausible that he apparently has the opportunity to do whatever he wants. If you want to overcome these naiveties, the developments and coincidences present in history can be justified thanks to his role as a detective and the fact that he does not lack money: he therefore has the resources, methods and facade as a harmless person to allow him not to arouse suspicion and to escape police investigations himself. It is to be seen if these aspects will be deepened in the future given that, as effective as it is, the narrative cannot go on exclusively on Dan channeling his violent impulses to those who “deserve it”.
In addition, the supporting characters are a bit neglected and, as mentioned before, the “bad guys” on duty are quite one-dimensional, making it easy to dehumanize them in bloody scenes.
The drawings are well done, especially the expressions of anger, terror and disgust of the characters, the only flaw is sometimes the backgrounds, where you can see a little too clearly that photographs were manipulated to make them.
At this point it is clear that this manga - being representations of mutilated people, rapes and fairly explicit violent scenes of all kinds - is not a suitable reading for those who know that certain contents could disturb them, as well as those who do not appreciate morally ambiguous protagonists and a plot that you do not know yet where it wants to go.
