ME WO MITE HANASE

Hitoshi Iwaaki takes a late 21st century violence trigger and runs with it. I am of course talking about the immortal line uttered by thugs all over the world: what are you staring at?

Doesn’t matter if you weren’t, they'll shout it at you anyway; spittle flying. Any excuse for a fight. In this story people are throwing the line at each other all day, and our unlucky protagonist happens to have it thrown at him.

Funnily enough, this guy doesn’t like looking people in the eyes anyway, so the irony is lovely. Even more so when after he wakes up from his beating he can’t see peoples’ eyes anymore. A side-effect of this condition befallen the man is that people react better to him because they think he's looking at them properly when they communicate, the irony keeps getting laid thick on the man and he doesn’t like it one bit.

This is a humorous psychological thriller, kind of in the same vein as Hideo Yamamoto's Homunculus. Hitoshi Iwaaki is an excellent manga author, he not only tackles this social problem with humour but he strips the comedy away bit by bit, upping the pointless violence to alarming levels until the last few pages where outright horror rears its head with full pages and one double-page spread in particular, leading to an ambiguous and dark climax.

I did not really come at this looking for a delinquent style "hilarious" manga, since I do not really care about that. What I wanted was some more Parasyte, and Iwaaki definitely delivers!

For me, the humor derived from his works starts and ends with the art, and this was some of the funniest. Nomura's straight, excessively wide mouthed :| face at the beginning to display his indifference is really humorous and carries the first several pages. When Nomura wakes up to an eyeless world on page 11, the humor jumps into overdrive, keyed around the middle panel on the page where the eyeless doctor dismisses the problem with a simple "That's astounding!" and overly happy grin.

Now, there are some weak points to the story. An example would be the indifference Nomura shows to a gang beating, and his sudden surprise and clichéd responses to the situation. There is also too much of an exaggerative cynicism with no one wanting to stop little kids from getting too rough with each other. I felt the character of Nomura's girlfriend, Fuyumi, was a bit too simplistic and detracted from the story. In the end, these flaws should not really matter much for enjoyment purposes with this being a 44 page one shot, but it is the reason for my 8/10 rating. If you enjoyed other works by Iwaaki, then read this!