Bloody Monday
29 Sep 2008 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mayoraaseiBecause a live drama is going to be made of this manga, I decided to have a read of it...which must have been the same line of thought that prompted scanlators to pick up this manga recently.
Strangely enough, the tone reminded me a lot of Death Note. Or maybe of Hunter x Hunter during the Kurapika/York Shin arc. It's dark, relentless (but not over the top with gore), the pace is fast and the suspense is maintained for the first 8 chapters I managed to read.
The story begins with a beautiful woman buying a deadly virus (supposedly an engineered combination of smallpox and ebola...the world is full of psychopaths) from someone in Russia. Just before she leaves, she infects the man who sold her the virus whilst being protected by a vaccine.
The story cuts to Japan, where Takagi Fujimura appears to be leading a normal high school life - but he is in fact a genius hacker who goes by the byname Falcon (a pun on his last name where "taka" = falcon). Ever since being caught in one of his hacking sprees, he's been hired to work for his father, who is employed with an underground national security organisation.
A beautiful young teacher transfers to Takagi's school, and she turns out to be none other than - you guessed it - the woman who bought the virus. A few days later, his father was having a secret meeting with someone passing on important information when that man was sniped, and his father subsequently framed for murder. A national fugitive, the last words Takagi received from his dad was "dispose of what I asked you to decode" and "remember the words Bloody Monday".
Of course the natural thing to do then was to decode exactly what his dad told him to dispose, and to his and his friends' horror, it was a video file titled in Russian "Christmas Massacre" that recorded the explosive pox growth and haemorrhage produced by the viral infection. Watching them watch the video was their teacher, who now must destroy the evidence and kill the students, all the while maintaining their trust.
Unfortunately the scanlators only released 8 chapters out of 6 volumes, but if it can keep up the suspense and cleverness, it is an interesting story. In some ways there are similarities between Takagi and Raito - they're both prodigies, their fathers are both employed as some sort of policeman/national security officer, they both have a younger sister, and they both have someone by their side who dogs their every move and tries to foil their plans. But there the similarity ends. Takagi is of course more a traditional shounen hero, in that he actually is a hero. He wants to protect his father and sister, not use and dispose. He has friends he trusts in who will prove invaluable for his subsequent investigations.
And he is much, much more human. He knows his strengths - well, Raito does too - but perhaps because he excels only in that one area, he doesn't have the arrogance that ultimately destroyed Raito. He's much more grounded, much less cynical...much more conventional and easier to sympathise with.
Though I haven't read enough...I'd recommend it to anyone who liked Death Note. Not that you'll necessarily find the same ingenuity as in Death Note...
Strangely enough, the tone reminded me a lot of Death Note. Or maybe of Hunter x Hunter during the Kurapika/York Shin arc. It's dark, relentless (but not over the top with gore), the pace is fast and the suspense is maintained for the first 8 chapters I managed to read.
The story begins with a beautiful woman buying a deadly virus (supposedly an engineered combination of smallpox and ebola...the world is full of psychopaths) from someone in Russia. Just before she leaves, she infects the man who sold her the virus whilst being protected by a vaccine.
The story cuts to Japan, where Takagi Fujimura appears to be leading a normal high school life - but he is in fact a genius hacker who goes by the byname Falcon (a pun on his last name where "taka" = falcon). Ever since being caught in one of his hacking sprees, he's been hired to work for his father, who is employed with an underground national security organisation.
A beautiful young teacher transfers to Takagi's school, and she turns out to be none other than - you guessed it - the woman who bought the virus. A few days later, his father was having a secret meeting with someone passing on important information when that man was sniped, and his father subsequently framed for murder. A national fugitive, the last words Takagi received from his dad was "dispose of what I asked you to decode" and "remember the words Bloody Monday".
Of course the natural thing to do then was to decode exactly what his dad told him to dispose, and to his and his friends' horror, it was a video file titled in Russian "Christmas Massacre" that recorded the explosive pox growth and haemorrhage produced by the viral infection. Watching them watch the video was their teacher, who now must destroy the evidence and kill the students, all the while maintaining their trust.
Unfortunately the scanlators only released 8 chapters out of 6 volumes, but if it can keep up the suspense and cleverness, it is an interesting story. In some ways there are similarities between Takagi and Raito - they're both prodigies, their fathers are both employed as some sort of policeman/national security officer, they both have a younger sister, and they both have someone by their side who dogs their every move and tries to foil their plans. But there the similarity ends. Takagi is of course more a traditional shounen hero, in that he actually is a hero. He wants to protect his father and sister, not use and dispose. He has friends he trusts in who will prove invaluable for his subsequent investigations.
And he is much, much more human. He knows his strengths - well, Raito does too - but perhaps because he excels only in that one area, he doesn't have the arrogance that ultimately destroyed Raito. He's much more grounded, much less cynical...much more conventional and easier to sympathise with.
Though I haven't read enough...I'd recommend it to anyone who liked Death Note. Not that you'll necessarily find the same ingenuity as in Death Note...
