Content Warning: This review, and the manga it highlights, deal directly (and often) with the subject of suicide. This manga is also sexually explicit and not safe to read at work.
What stood out to me about Boy’s Abyss (Shonen no Abisu in Japan) in hindsight was that every character the story interacted with was haunted by the legend of their town. Up the road, not far from Market Street, or the school, or the bridge that becomes the centerpiece for many chapters of Ryou Minenami’s Seinen manga, is a place called Lover’s Abyss. Made popular by the novel Spring's Coffin (a fictional novel famous within the story), Lover’s Abyss is the location of a lover’s suicide that happened a generation before our main cast takes the stage. Throughout the six volumes currently available – through tumult and peril, life and death, escape – nearly all of the characters are burdened with the mystery, or in some ways the seduction, of Lover’s Abyss, which not only connects all of their stories in a meaningful way, but builds their foundational drives.
Small towns are the settings for many dark stories because they easily embody a relatable seclusion from what a majority of readers may currently be experiencing. In Boy’s Abyss, the small town is introduced as Reiji, the main protagonist, takes the very attractive and secretly pop idol famous Nagi Aoe around on the back of his bike. He’s amazed that she has decided to live in their small town after not only being famous, but also living in Tokyo (a place he dreams of going, but feels very far from ever living in). Reiji, who has many challenges to his home life and with his self esteem, is easily swooned by the story of Lover’s Abyss and the idea that a lover’s suicide might actaully be a way to escape his life; while that is a very obvious and emotionally charged journey for the main focus of the story, it is not what I’m talking about when I say the characters are haunted by Lover’s Abyss. Nagi Aoe knows the story – she’s read it– saying at one point, looking over a bridge at night with Reiji, as they both dwindle into apathy, “I kinda felt jealous [after reading Spring’s Coffin]. It’s the happiest way to die, after all.”
But Boy’s Abyss is not a loveletter to suicide, despite its repeated motifs and direct mention of the act. Reiji goes through many iterations of the outcomes of his own death and, repeatedly, finds reasons to live (even if they are, sometimes, for the wrong reasons). Most of the characters are confronted by it. The dreary, rainy small town. The poverty of Reiji’s family and why they feel stuck in their situation. The bridge, ominously between Market Street and home. As Reiji tumbles to the edge of the bridge and back to the safety of the grassy hill just to the side of it, he is embraced by the different characters in his life. His best friend, Sakuko, who introduced him to Nagi’s idol group, not to mention the novel Spring’s Coffin, fills him with hope that they can both escape to Tokyo and be happy together. Yuri, a well meaning homeroom teacher, interferes to give Reiji some financial and housing assistance – although, at points, this is to his detriment and serves to amplify his depression and hopelessness. As you get further into the volumes, Boy’s Abyss becomes a deeply connected story that often pays off things that were thrown away early in its serialization in Young Jump magazine. The characters shift and push against each other, always leaving room for new realizations and perils. Reiji goes from hopeless high school senior, stuck in the endless cycle of his family’s life, to someone with profound life experience stuck in the endless cycle still.
The serialized nature of the story works for a large part of the six volumes that have been translated, but towards the end (as new chapters are released weekly, then later translated and put online) the story begins to reach further than its core premise. At a certain point it became obvious the manga was popular and the demand meant the story would need to continue much further than it might have been originally planned. Side characters are given front-facing motivations and storylines that feel slightly out of place next to the pitch-perfect mood of the first five or so volumes.
Popularity, while good for the manga and for reaching a larger audience, can often lead to unreasonable (and dangerous) work conditions. An ongoing conversation about burnout and health risks related to the timelines and expectations of manga and anime are a topic that I have only recently become aware of, but see as a parallel to conversations about game design crunch, wherein a smaller number of people than necessary are rushed and bullied into completing tasks through extremely long work periods, despite the evidence being high that this practice does not produce quality work or longevity in the industry. This is all to say that I do want this manga to blow up and become popular, but not at the risk of the creator’s mental or physical health and, while I think it’s within the means of this review to be slightly critical of the story spreading thinner than it may have been originally planned, I’d like to note that this is definitely not a commentary on how the creator should just “work harder” or “plan better,” but instead a commentary on how we should treat creators with patience, time, and the money they need to live productive and healthy lives doing what they love to do.
Boy’s Abyss is the best manga I’ve read so far. After consuming six volumes, I started over because I knew there would be minute details I missed and couldn’t stop thinking about them. The characters and the writing are deep wells of human insight and drama. At no point, even now, do I feel like I would be able to tell you where their lives would go or in some cases where they’ve been. But I feel like I know all the characters so well. I think about Reiji and Sakuko’s friendship. I think about Nagi Aoe and why she made the choice to leave fame to live as an anonymous person in a small town. I want to read Spring’s Coffin, which we get small excerpts of in the later chapters. Ryou Minenami reaches into the dark, small town of Boy’s Abyss and finds a cast that can not only act as the shadow facets of a relatable psyche, but also shows his audience where people come from and how they’re built; how escape is misguided by youthful angst, and how a home can be shaped around the survival more than the unit of a family.
More people need to read Boy’s Abyss so I can talk to them about some of the elements I wasn’t able to spoil in this review. Unfortunately the only place to read the English translations legally right now is through Kindle. A physical edition has not been produced yet in English.