24/03/2020 Suspenseful manga to take your mind off deadlines

1) Emerging (Masaya Hokazono)

This manga might be a little too thrilling, given the corona-craze! It’s about a mysterious virus that quickly spreads across Tokyo and the Japanese authorities are powerless to halt its spread or even treat the disease. It’s really quite scary because the disease is quite awful – it makes your eyes bleed and if it gets bad enough, you could explode and infect lots of other people! I like how the author shows the authorities and the medical research people work together to contain and eventually start to treat the virus, but at the same time it’s also very frightening how a virus can spread, especially when you see it through the eyes of a patient. It’s one of the best “virus outbreak” manga I’ve ever read.

2) Manhole (Tetsuya Tsutsui)

This series is a bit like the previous one, but it involves a serial killer. So, the story begins with a diseased-looking man stumbling out of a manhole and wandering into town before dropping dead. The police begin to investigate and discover several similar incidents and a common thread linking the disparate happenings – a serial killer is involved. However, this series goes one step further because the murder weapon is quite special and the authorities have to employ drastic measures to defuse the threat.

3) Liar Game (Shinobu Kaitani)

A college student who’s too honest for her own good gets tangled into a sort of “battle of wits” where contestants play mind games with enormous sums of money on the line. The games could be something like “vote yes or no” or a more complicated betting game like “werewolf”. The rules are pretty complex and super interesting and it’s really exciting to see the players try to guess what their opponents will do. More importantly, the cast is quite likeable and it’s very fun to follow these characters and there’s quite a bit of character development, like when some of the evil characters who learn a lesson and reform.

4) Kyoushitsu Jibaku Club (Aoisei Anajiro)

A few years ago, a bullied student blew himself up with a bomb vest in class and killed almost the entire class, but there were a few survivors who lived with serious injuries. Years later, they returned to their classroom but one of the students pulls out a bomb and threatens to blow them all up unless they stay with him and figure out who was truly responsible for the explosion. Meanwhile, another bullied student (coincidentally in the same school building) also threatens to kill her classmates with a bomb vest but first puts her classmate through increasingly embarrassing ordeals as a means of getting her revenge. The rest of the manga follows these two groups as they try to figure out what’s going on. It’s pretty exciting and the ending is fairly well explained, in that you figure out who’s responsible for what, even if it’s a bit implausible.

5) Rule – Annihilation Classroom (Usui Tomomi)

A transfer student arrives to his new class and fits in fairly well, but he’s puzzled by all the strange rules, particularly one where he has to ignore the girl sitting in the corner. Curious, he starts to poke around these rules and people start to die! This is a fairly standard “death game” set-up but it’s competently executed and I read it all the way to the end. I like that they explained what the hell was going on, like who the killer(s) was/were and why the rules were implemented. I get really angry when they leave these things unexplained!

6) Ikenie Touhyou (Kasai Ryuuya)

Here’s another “death game” but without the “death” part: there’s this website/app that gives a vote to the class every day and based on the vote, someone’s secrets get revealed unless the whole class does something (like tap a button a few thousand times). In that sense, this series adds another mechanism on top of the usual voting in a “death game”, which is quite refreshing. Some of the secrets are a little disturbing, but the plotting and suspense is the fun part of this series. Again, I like that the author explains who was behind the games, although the ending is deliberately left open. Something else that’s pretty cool is that the story has two “death games” set several years apart so we get to see the events happen from a student’s perspective and a teacher’s perspective. I think this is one of the best “death game” manga around!

~ Urushibara chan ❤️