Kaikisen by Satoshi Kon

Well, I sure took my time getting back. I blame Taletell Game's Tales of Monkey Island and my life-long obsession with Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™

Kaikisen by Satoshi Kon

Art and story (c) Satoshi Kon

Genre: Seinen, Fantasy
Length: One Volume – 9 Chapters and one extra One-shot


           This manga has a semi-realistic style, round faces and small eyes, with hatch marks for shading and detail. The movements and the look of the bodies are natural and easy to follow, and the facial expressions are just as well done. The clothing isn’t particularly interesting, it looks like the rest of the art, normal and common. There is good variation to the types of people in the story, too. Very professional and easy to read.
           Yosuke is the son of a Shinto priest and the successor to a tradition as old as the seaside

town he lives in. Up a tall set of stairs near his house, in a shrine behind lock and key, is a mermaid's egg. His ancestors made a pact with a mermaid and Yosuke is the most recent heir of the ancient agreement to watch over it. It is a secret kept for so long a time but now that the town is trying to modernize, an act led by a land developer and Yosuke's father, the egg is being used as publicity for the construction and the up coming mermaid festival. Yosuke doesn't really believe the egg is real but strange things are beginning to happen…
           This story is like a hot summer month, it moves slowly until the end when its over too quick. The beginning is a lot of dialog with out a lot of explanation, with days passing easily and no answers being given about what will actually happen later. You meet the characters here and there as Yosuke wanders the town between his studying sessions. Then, all at once, the story gets up and dashes away with you having to scramble to follow. Its a good story, a little spooky and a little bittersweet, but it is also very plain. I labeled it as fantasy but it's not really, it reads much more like a slice of life manga where you just come in on some one's life for a little while and see what happens. Yosuke is rather

sluggish and doing his best to ignore something he actually takes an interest in but you only really find out why at the very end; up to that point he is rather unlikeable. The moral of conserving nature rather than bulldozing it is an old one, especially for places like Japan since its an island, so there isn't a lot of freshness to the plot because of that point. The mermaid's egg though, is the opposite, because it seems like an old story, it gives that part of the plot weight and a pulling power; you want to find out exactly what the egg is and what will or will not happen with it. As Yosuke is kind of a do-nothing, he also is disappointing in the middle parts of the plot, though. It all comes out pretty average in the end, its a good read with good art but it isn't something to be remembered or read over and over again. The added one shot at the end is okay, older art and a bit of a cute ending but it doesn't add anything to the enjoyment of the previous story, plus it is very trope-y and annoyingly so. This manga is actually written by the same man who directed the anime movies Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika, all of which are pretty famous and I recommend the last three as I have seen and own them and regard them as very fascinating movies. He did die rather abruptly in 2010, but his movies have, like this manga, a touch of realness and absurdity to them.




2.5/5 Okay to read but not worth searching out the story specifically.