Manga Review: Orochi: The Perfect Edition 2 by Kazuo Umezz
Quick recap: Orochi is a seemingly immortal being in the shape of a young woman who can pass anywhere from high school to college age. While her name evokes the eight-headed serpent of Japanese folklore, Orochi does not appear to be of ill intent. She’s motivated primarily by curiosity about the short-lived humans she dwells among, going from place to place and observing strange situations.
This volume contains three stories from the classic late Sixties horror manga.
“Prodigy” opens randomly at a street festival (with a shout-out to Kazuo Umezz’s other series about a mysterious being who gets involved with weird events, The Cat-Eyed Boy.) Orochi is following a young man who she’s been keeping tabs on since he was an infant. Yu Tachibana used to be a happy baby with doting parents. On his first birthday, a robber broke into the house, and in the ensuing struggle, Yu was stabbed in the neck.
Orochi lost contact with the family for a short time when they moved to Tokyo; by the time she finds them again, things have changed. Yu is shunned by other children because of his ugly neck scar. His mother has become obsessed with Yu’s academic achievement, forcing the preschooler to study rather than play, which the child naturally resents.
At school, Yu gets the derisive nickname “Books” because all he does is study, never playing or showing interest in fun (and the kids are still creeped out by the scar.) His mother is a demanding “education mama”, insisting on giving him a tutor to study subjects well in advance of what a normal child would be handling. His father has become something of an alcoholic.
At age eleven, Yu visits a library on the pretext of a social studies project, and reads a news story on the attack that scarred him. Suddenly, he stops fighting back against his mother’s domineering demands, and becomes a model student on the surface, though he has disturbing ideas about how to get ahead. Even so, Orochi is still worried about the child, and once he gets into high school, joins him as a classmate. The other students are still creeped out by him, but the bullying dies away as they mature a bit. Yu still doesn’t make any friends.
Finally, it’s time for Yu to test for admission into his father’s alma mater, K University. Time for the horrific twist!
“Home” tells the tale of Shoichi Sugiyama. He was raised in a remote farming community, and had a normal rural childhood. But in school, he became dissatisfied with the farming life so resolved to move to the big city on the invitation of a friend. Sugiyama vowed not to return until he’d made a success of himself.
But about a year in, his friend absconded with Sugiyama’s savings and clothing. At that point, Sugiyama found out the money he’d given his friend for rent had not been paid to the landlady, and the alleged friend had also forged his name on multiple debt documents to get enough money to blow town for good. Sugiyama was also forced to leave town for his own safety and took up life under a different name, sinking into gang life.
Orochi comes across Sugiyama again a few years later, just as he gets into a brawl. Orochi helps him out with her powers, but he is still badly injured and lies at the brink of death. Orochi decides to travel to Sugiyama’s home town in hopes of finding someone (his parents perhaps?) to notify and perhaps convince to come for the dying man.
To her surprise, Sugiyama is also on the train, looking much better, and ready to finally return home. When they get to the village, it is much the same as when they left it. At first. As Sugiyama settles in with his still living parents, Orochi begins to notice there’s something wrong with the town. A childhood prank by Soichi Sugiyama may have unleashed a great evil.
This is the most openly horrific of the stories in this volume. There’s a final twist that would have spoiled a lesser tale, but works well here.
“Key” opens with Orochi deciding to move into an apartment complex because she senses something interesting will happen there. The first person she meets is a little boy who gives her bad directions. Hiroyuki Watanabe is a brat who constantly fibs for no good reason, steals things he has no need for, and doesn’t study in school. Everyone except his parents calls him by his nickname “Liar”.
Liar’s reputation comes back to haunt him when he witnesses his neighbor apparently murdering her handicapped daughter. No one believes this tall tale. Well, almost no one. The parents of that little girl would like to have a word with him…alone. And no one is going to help a brat like Liar, when they all know he’s just fibbing to be mean to the nice couple.
Orochi’s snoopiness comes in handy here, and the story ends a bit more happily than it might otherwise have done. But Liar doesn’t appear to have fully learned his lesson.
Orochi remains an enigma in this volume, with almost nothing revealed about her personal past or exactly what kind of being she is. Her powers are ill-defined, but are notably weakened when she’s injured. She might do protagonistic things from time to time, especially in “Home” but is far more interested in being a meddling observer. The primary interest is the human stories going on around her.
The art is impressive, and gives a dark, gloomy feel to the stories whenever necessary.
That said, these are stock stories in their way, just very well done, so they may seem overly familiar, especially “Key”.
Content note: bloody violence, peril to children, child abuse.
If you liked the first volume, this one is also good value.
And for some music that feels like “Home”:
