Manga Review: From the Red Fog 1 by Mosae Nohara
The place is England, in the late Nineteenth Century. Ruwanda Bailey is twelve years old, and from his earliest memories, his mother has kept him locked in the cellar. Miranda Bailey is beautiful, often compared to a rose, but her “thorn” is her habit of murdering people. Despite her hatred of children, Miranda would let Ruwanda up from the cellar at night to help her dispose of corpses, and he developed a taste for killing people himself, usually the nannies hired to give him a basic education.
The story proper begins with their house being broken into by men who might have killed Miranda (she’s certainly not in good shape, but Ruwanda is in no position to verify) and are about to search the cellar. The boy flees by a side entrance, and goes out into the world for the first time. He soon discovers that many adults are not to be trusted, but they’re also not prepared for children that can fight back.
The one adult that Ruwanda meets that seems genuinely compassionate is Will, who runs an orphanage for children who lost their parents during the recent war. Ruwanda doesn’t disabuse Will of the assumption that he too is a war orphan, but things go poorly when the lad murders most of the other orphans for fun.
A fair distance away, Ruwanda is taken in by another murderous adult, who works for a “Lord Winter.” In the nearby woods, he meets a girl named Makarau who likes hunting and killing small animals. They hit it off, but she must leave for London.
Lord Winter appears, and he has a job that requires Ruwanda’s special talents. In London. You don’t need to feel too much pity for the lad’s targets this time around as their specialty is torturing young boys to death. But it does lead to some personal…regret, perhaps, for Ruwanda.
Having retrieved a certain object, Ruwanda meets a boy named Ivan who is both murderer and thief, who takes him to Lord Winter’s hideout. This turns out to be a den of assassins who work for the lord, with an eye to eventual higher power and control over society.
This blood-soaked manga has some nicely-detailed art.
The Victorian Era setting feels inauthentic, honored primarily in costumes, while the random-sounding names and dubious social interactions play against it. One thing that doesn’t work for me is all the murderers acting with complete impunity until they run into other murderers. There’s not one mention of police. (When Victorian authors wanted such a setting, they put the story in the Eighteenth Century.)
While Will believes that no one is born evil, it’s notable that the murderous children have murderous parents, so there’s some implication that it’s “in the blood.”
To be honest, there’s no characters here that I am especially interested in following. Ruwanda murders defenseless children for fun, and there’s no antagonist who is less murdery/has limits for me to root for. Lord Winter may be more evil overall, but that just makes me want to have the cops arrest everyone.
Content note: Gory murder, including of children. Ruwanda is raped, with the act itself offscreen. Child abuse in general. Animal death. Body function…humor? Alcohol abuse, and it is set up that drug abuse will be a thing in future volumes. Male nudity from behind.
I know there’s a market for stories about unrepentant murderers up against other murderers. Dexter fans might like this. I, though, will be skipping future volumes.
