A very emotionally moving manga from one of the masters of horror, who refuses to be pigeonholed into a niche genre.
Paraíso is different from the usual Maruo manga, which is characterized by a parade of scenes filled with gore, sex and luxury.
Set in the second world war and its aftermath, Paraíso is a collection of loosely related stories about children trying to survive in a world that has just ended: post war Japan; it's also a world that's just starting to come to life. Death and rebirth.
These kids are all orphans determined to be free and become the masters of their own fate. Surely, they're taken advantage of by the adults who sorround them and the material conditions of the ruined Japan are enough to make anyone go insane but the overall picture is brighter than in the rest of Maruo's manga: the world is not completely hopeless nor are all humans disgustingly evil.
It's the nuance that makes Paraíso fascinating. The name of the series itself is very alluring: Paradise. We are not really shown any paradise, these people actually live in Hell (the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima) but their hearts want to overcome this Hell, their hearts point towards heaven. Christianity is one of the main themes in this manga, after all Maruo himself is from Hiroshima, one of Japan's historic strongholds of Christianity. Maruo sees Christianity with fascination, he's very aware of the crimes these "holy men" are capable of and of the superiority complex which poisons the heart of a lot of christians (which superiority complex is present in the other two Abrahamic religions by nature of their theology); but he's also very thoughtful of the capacity for profound compassion towards other's suffering that the most pious christians can show and the mental fortitude that a belief in the afterlife can instill, even in the most dire of conditions. Yes, the christian missionaries in Japan were there ALSO with a colonial agenda typical of the proselytizing nature of the Gospel, but at the same time they showed a sort of love that the American soldiers occupying the ravaged streets of Japan didn't. The Japanese in this stories are suspicious of christianity, which they see as a stupid an alien religion but they are also curious, and learn one thing or two from it.
One topic I hadn't seen touched anywhere else in manga is that of the mystical experience, which is explored in the last chapter. It's depiction truly made me tremble and almost moved me to tears, Maruo's sensibility on this topic is commendable. The sole inclusion of this topic in the manga is what exhorts me to recommend you this manga. In this current era of skepticism and total disregard for religion, Maruo raises the question of wether we can dismiss religion -christianity in this particular case- in its totality as something of the past for which we have no use.
The visual aspect of Paraíso is just as good as its literary side, Maruo has only become better with time and his completely analogical technique turn his manga in some of the best looking in the industry. Seriously, go and read it.
