Four-and-a-half stars. This is Hanazawa’s magnum opus.

When I read Hanazawa’s I Am a Hero quite a few years ago, I assumed it was his debut work. The first few chapters of that story were that kind of somewhat-inept awkward, as if coming from an author who hasn’t quite realized how to properly present his ideas. That changed as the very long series (about 260 chapters) progressed, so you forgive that kind of shit. Unless you didn’t get through those initial chapters, that is. But I’ve read so much manga that it seems I have run out of “serious” manga (no more Oyasumi Punpun out there), and I returned to Hanazawa to figure out if anything else of his was good. I read his actual debut, about an ugly bastard who falls in love with an AI in a virtual world (here’s the review for Ressentiment). I liked it a lot. The drawings were the most amateurish part, but the plot was tight and well-woven. The single other work between Ressentiment and I Am a Hero is a long-running series named Boys on the Run, produced in the second half of the 2000s. I loved it. To my surprise, Hanazawa most famous I Am a Hero is a significant step down from his best work.

This series I’m reviewing follows a young man in his twenties named Tanishi. He’s kind of a loser: his looks are average, he is a virgin, he lives with his parents, he works as a salesman for one of those companies that produce toys for vending machines (even though he’s a terrible salesman), and the girl he likes, who is a coworker of his, considers him a stalker (or at least badmouths him as one). This is mainly a character study, a bildungsroman of sorts: we are to witness how a boy who has been dealt bad cards in life tries to become a respectable man.

Most of Hanazawa’s main characters are fuck-ups, including Tanishi. While they share that with most of Minoru Furuya’s protagonists (Furuya being my overall favorite mangaka), ultimately Furuya’s are good guys who are screwed up. I can’t say the same thing for Hanazawa’s. This story’s protagonist considers other people’s luck or accomplishments something of a personal affront, he’s morally weak, and has very little self-control, leading him to break promises and/or fuck himself over in a way that made it hard for me to sympathize with him at times. There were several points in which I wanted to yell, “What the fuck are you doing? Stop, and get out of there!” He’s the “act first and think of the consequences later” type.

Do you know what a mid-way turning point is? Many books on writing consider it the most important piece of a story. That mid-way turning point is something like the main mast in a circus tent, ensuring the structure doesn’t collapse. It makes everything that happened before it a prequel to the true meat of the story, which will come afterwards. It sets a clear before-and-after deal, to the extent that the majority of the characters we grew familiar with in the first half no longer appear in the second. Such turning points tend to be spoilers. Some books on writing suggest that when trying to come up with a story, you shouldn’t start plotting properly until you have nailed down that turned point. I mention it because Boys on the Run has a perfect mid-way turning point that closes the curtain on most everything that came before. Without giving away spoilers, I’d say the first half of Boys on the Run is about winning over a girl (in truth, a sort of Japanese version of Taxi Driver), and the second is about boxing.

Anyway, let’s give a few concrete details about what one can expect from this tale. Tanishi is, as mentioned, working as a salesman for a struggling toy company. They are competing with a large toy company who is taking over most of the available spaces in restaurants and specialized stores for vending machines. So Tanishi is a loser working for losers. Tanishi is attracted to their toy designer, a cute girl and also the sole female worker. She’s nice to everyone. Most of the male coworkers, generally unused to interacting with women, treat her as their local princess.

Tanishi tries to get closer to her, but keeps fucking up. At one point he lent her his favorite porn video, of all things (I don’t recall the circumstances that made it seem okay), only to end up giving her a DVD of bestiality instead, one that belonged to the guy to whom he had lent the porn DVD. In retrospect, this whole porn video thing is likely a reference to Taxi Driver; there are far more overt references to that movie later.

In any case, Tanishi also becomes friendly with a rival salesman, an attractive young man who opened up to Tanishi about his troubles keeping up with the demands of his job. Tanishi and his love interest, along with this salesman and his girlfriend, hang out like friends, and things look like Tanishi is finally going to experience some normalcy.

Tanishi’s love interest, this toy designer, is, unfortunately, a two-faced bitch. One of the most infuriating characters I’ve come across in manga recently. I wanted to grab Tanishi and tell him that she’s bad news and that he should stay the fuck away from her, but a boy’s gotta learn from experience. Once you’re deep into the second half of the story, that whole deal with the first girl, whom Tanishi was very serious about, becomes like one of those regrets in the back of your mind, that you wish you could scrub out of your brain. I’m not sure to what extent this is a spoiler, as I knew she was rotten from very early on.

A character that comes out of nowhere in the first half of this story ended up becoming my favorite. She’s a pretty girl with bleached-blonde hair, always wearing a red Puma tracksuit, and who appeared twice to punch someone: first the protagonist, and later the Yakuza goon that was beating up the protagonist. She’s clearly a trained boxer. If I recall correctly, she didn’t even have speaking parts in that first half; she came out of nowhere like an angel of violence, exerted precise punishment, then left quietly. Great introduction to make her mysterious. In the second half of this story, centered around boxing, she becomes a main character.

Throughout this tale, our main man Tanishi gets beaten up over and over, literally or not. He tries hard to achieve things, only to get reminded by life that he’s not meant to win. Sure, sometimes it’s due to his own stupidity, although one could argue that nature made him that way. Tanishi lacks a good sense of what he’s capable of, so he keeps overreaching, and no matter how hard he tries, it’s very, very rarely enough.

This story features lots of great moments. Tanishi’s fight against a certain douchebag who happens to be a capoeira master is a memorable one, but Boys on the Run also features one of the wildest, most satisfying rescue sequences I’ve ever come across. Everything I could say about it is a spoiler, but if I had to give just one hint, it would be this: it prominently features explosive diarrhea.

My sole issue with Boys on the Run, which removed half a star from a perfect rating, is that at various points, Tanishi should be dead, or at least brain-dead. Not only he survives beatings that should have definitely killed him, but he survives them without major disfigurement and other permanent injuries, which is bullshit. At one point he had most of his scalp burned and a bulging hematoma that covered half of his forehead, with no lasting repercussions. Don’t set up severe stakes without paying them off properly; it diminishes the seriousness of the whole deal.

In short, fucking read Boys on the Run, will ya? If you enjoy manga, you’ll probably love this.

Four stars.

This manga starts with its protagonist being sentenced to death after having killed fifteen people. His childhood friend and love of his life was raped and murdered, so the protagonist took it upon himself to castrate and murder fifteen sexual offenders. I’m not sure if the rapist and murderer of his friend was among them.

Anyway, the protagonist gets hanged to death.

Turns out, this is an isekai, just an unusual one. The protagonist wakes up on a pile of corpses. In the sky, the sun is doing weird shit, looking like an out-of-control nuclear reactor. The first humans he sees are school girls, who proceed to freak out upon seen him, referring to him as a “beast.” One of them shoots arrows at him. After they realize that the protagonist is more or less sane, they agree to let him live by now. Shortly after, the girl who had shot arrows at our protagonist gets raped and devoured by a monstrous man.

We learn that in this alternate reality to which the protagonist got isekai-d, three months ago, a solar flare fucked up men’s DNA or something, turning them into mindless beasts solely preoccupied in what men want to do all the time but only flimsy self-restraint prevents them from doing so: rape, devour and murder women, sometimes simultaneously. All females that the protagonist comes across fear that the guy will do the same to them.

As if the reality that a flare had turned all men into rape-and-murder machines wasn’t enough, plenty of females in this story have complaints to offer about how they were exploited by men even before the world went to shit.

Other women see in the young protagonist a source of healthy semen, and therefore the chance for humanity to survive the apocalypse.

What follows is a mix of The Last of Us (the first game; as far as I’m concerned, the second game and TV series never existed), Attack on Titan, and most zombie stories. The protagonist and his companions come across different ways of trying to survive the post-apocalypse: family affairs; rigid, hierarchical structures; wild anarchy. Along the way, dozens or hundreds of people get raped, murdered, and eaten, sometimes not even by the mutated humans. This story is ballsy as hell when it comes to making even some main characters’ day quite terrible.

The manga touches upon interesting topics. Will the surviving societies be “equal” because only women are involved, or will they turn out to be new systems of exploitation? Does any sense of morality matter when at any point you can get raped and eaten by mutated men with enormous dongs? The protagonist is traumatized by the notion of sex, because his friend was raped and murdered, but isn’t his duty to provide semen to save the human race? In this case, would it be ethical to force him to do so?

I was surprised by how well the author handled the characters. They had distinct personalities and clear motivations, which often conflicted with one another’s. Some start out malicious only to end up sympathetic, or viceversa. Quite a few characters are memorable, including the protagonist, the childhood friend, a semen-obsessed teacher, a sociopathic teen, the anarchic biker girl who wanted to capture ten-year-old mutated boys for sex, etc.

In the end, this lovely tale dishes out what the title promised: rebirth (well, technically reincarnation) and castration. Lots of men lose their penises in creative ways. If any of this sounds like fun, you’ll probably enjoy this ride. I know I did.

Four-and-a-half stars.

For once, this isn’t an isekai: the story is set long in the future, after some apocalypse about which the survivors are still trying to figure out the specifics. Apparently their predecessors had become so advanced that they were mixing biological engineering with super-AI or some shit, until their industries went haywire and started mass-producing mutated monsters that overwhelmed the world. Those facilities seem to be still active somewhere, pumping out enhanced monstrosities. Seemingly the sole remains of humanity live in a megacity. More accurately, the wealthy live in the megacity. The rest of humanity (or just Japan?) endure in the surrounding slums. Among the unwashed masses, the local badasses are known as hunters, the only ones daring to venture into the wasteland to make their living. Killing monsters is profitable if they’re threatening the city or other hunters, but their main source of income are the relics of the old world: any random underground mall from the pre-apocalyptic world suddenly found attracts most hunters around, that won’t hesitate to murder each other for the loot if necessary.

Meet Akira. It’s a post-apocalyptic Japanese story set in the future, so someone named Akira had to be involved. We are introduced to him as a traumatized teenager who constantly gets robbed and generally bullied by local shitheads. During a monster attack, the guy has enough, and decides to defend himself with a gun against a group who are bound to kill him. Suddenly, a naked female spirit appears, and hovers casually toward him. Akira freaks out until she, who calls herself Alpha, explains that she’s an AI remnant of the pre-apocalypse, and that he’s the only one who can see her because his brain is attuned to the old-world networks still in place, so she can show herself to him as augmented reality. She’s not just a curiosity, though: she can offer Akira superhuman support, analyzing his environment, pointing out enemies, guiding his shots. After she manages to save him from explosions and monsters by telling him to stay put or move at times, he realizes that she’s trustworthy, and that this sexy ghost of the past is his ticket to a better life.

Alpha, as we piece together early on, isn’t that trustworthy. Apparently, for many cycles, she has been finding humans to support. All of those cycles have ended with the subject dying. In the latest one, the subject came close to succeeding in beating some final dungeon that Alpha wants her subjects to clear out, only for some information to have been revealed that made the subject turn against Alpha, who promptly took the subject out. What’s Alpha after, then? Is she on the side of the pre-apocalyptic humanity, who may only want to resurrect the old world no matter how many modern eggs need to be cracked? Is Alpha part of the same AI that mass-produces monstrosities? We still don’t know. Throughout the story, the friendship between Akira and Alpha is heartwarming, but as Akira becomes more and more dependent on her, in the back of your mind you know that she’s going to screw him over in the end. It remains to be seen, though, whether or not Akira would go along with whatever Alpha’s true objective is.

Akira is emotionally stunted. He was orphaned so young that he has no memory of his parents, and all he has known of people growing up is the need to protect himself from sentient wild beasts. As the story advances, he meets people who like him, and would even want to tear his clothes apart and mount him, but the part of his brain that ought to connect to people doesn’t work to any significant extent. Plenty of other compentent hunters see him as an uncaring loner who, despite his competence, is someone to be wary of. The exceptions are a few women in his life to whom he proved himself, and who are eager to take him under their wing and show him their delectable parts to get a rise out of him.

The gals in this story are delicious. Props to the author and the visual artist. From the teenage gang leader Sheryl to the redheaded murderess whose name I don’t remember but who was a super cyborg or something, you want to stare in awe and horniness. Thank you Japan for being you.

This is yet another one of those Japanese stories in which you follow the lives of the characters as they change and grow. Although some personalities clash, they have reasons for doing so. Some chapters are just about having a good time and hanging out with interesting characters that get along, and that’s something I think has been lost in Western stories, that are full of forced conflict and people acting like bastards to each other. As far as I’m concerned, you can rely entirely on the tension born from the story world and concept, as well as from some characters that are genuine bastards, and just have the rest of the crew navigating that while relying on each other.

I’m loving this story. I wish I could keep experiencing it, but I’ve run out of chapters. If you’re into Japanese stories with great action, careful worldbuilding, human stakes, and total babes, this is one of the greats as far as I’m concerned.

Also, why not, here’s an AI-generated short podcast about this review: