Determined to do whatever it takes to cover his ailing little brother's medical bills, Yuki and his friend Tetsu get caught trying to break into the local yakuza family's office. Hyodo, leader of the Seidoukai, however, is surprisingly willing to let them go unpunished and, what's more, even offers to take care of the hospital bills from now on. He has only one condition: Yuki, without fail, has to show up at the office once a week. Yuki accepts the offer - and his duties at the office turn out to be meaningless. Sitting around and playing chess, Yuki can't help but start to ask questions. Turns out Hyodo doesn't only have friends in the yakuza world and before Yuki knows it, he becomes caught up in a complicated turf war.

For some, this might be a dragging read. Character relations are many and complex, and the information necessary to understand what is going on is only revealed in small doses with more questions being raised in the process. While readers still wonder just who Hyodo is and where his interest in Yuki comes from, another syndicate with unknown motives is already making its move, and Yuki has an unpleasant encounter with a demon from his past. With it only getting more complicated from there and long and irregular intervals between chapter releases, it can be difficult to keep track of the story's various subplots and fairly large ensemble of characters. Everyone and everything seems to intertwine at one point or another, and it usually takes a few flashbacks to make sense of a present development in the story. Acid Town's plot sometimes feels a bit like a half-solved puzzle where the more easily distinguishable pieces are already grouped together but don't yet add up to a full picture. I suspect this to have great re-read value once it will be finished.

While it cannot be pinpointed exactly where or when the story takes place - the existence of a forbidden polluted zone hints at an environmental disaster in the near past, military aircraft passing over characters' heads during dramatic moments at an impending war - the underlying rule of the setting is best encapsulated in the following quote: "Things that you don't want to happen will happen, and there's no way to avoid it." The world these characters live in is a cruel one, and the manga does not shy away from showing this quite plainly at times. Yuki's and Tetsu's landlord Ryouji and Hyodo's subordinate Handa could be seen as comic relief characters - with their sunny attitude and dimwittedness, respectively, they relieve some of the tension. But even unexpected characters can be linked to darker elements of the story. Acid Town's world is a small one in which every character is in some way connected to almost every other character.

If this is BL, it's pushing the genre envelope. After four volumes, a central love story is nowhere to be found, and what overtones there are are likely to just leave you feeling conflicted. Some involve characters whose emotional scars, as it stands, make them seem incapable of the trust needed in a relationship. Some show that love can also be a motivation for bad rather than good. May it entail getting that revenge they thirst for or simply protecting what's important to them - Acid Town is all about people trying to make the best of their circumstances, crappy as they may be. This is not the manga to read if you're hoping for some smexy scenes, since it's about as far as you can get from manga in which abuse is presented in a way that is supposed to titillate the readership, and it isn't the right choice if you're looking for something that will make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. But the character's behavior is handled realistically, and even the not-so-pleasant ones are developed well enough to deserve some level of pity for their suffering.