Nijigahara Holograph

Nijigahara Holograph is a single tankobon horror series by Inio Asano.

    The story takes place in a city somewhere in the countryside of Japan and deals with a small number of characters and how events that took place ten years in the past have finally taken their toll on their current selves.  Much of the events deal with a legend surrounding a tunnel, Nijigahara, near the middle school.  Arie Kimura, a 5^th grader, starts to talk about there being a monster in the tunnel that will destroy the world unless a sacrifice is made to it.  The rest of her class gangs up on her and pushes her into a well where she suffers a severe brain injury and ends up in a coma.  Shortly afterwards a new student transfers from Tokyo, Suzuki, who had tried to commit suicide by jumping from the roof of his old school.  The classes’ homeroom teacher, Ms. Sakaki, tries to help Suzuki fit in, but she has her own problems as well.  Earlier in the year she was attacked by an unknown man while trying to stop him from raping a young girl at Nijigahara.  The attack left her right eye in terrible shape and she wears a bandage covering it while at school.  In the present time, Komatsuzuki, who has had strong feelings for Arie before she became comatose, tries to help her father as best he can in a way to atone for taking part in her accident.  When that help turns tragic he must try to reconnect with something that was lost to him when he was also thrown down a well and fulfill a prophesy relating to Nijigahara.

    This is an interesting and stark story dealing with the cruelty of children and their tendencies for savagery.  It lays out darker sides of humanity, some just under the surface of the story; hopelessness, rape, incest, abuse, etc.  The artwork is higher than the normal manga standard, with detailed backgrounds and a keen eye for lighting and personal details.  A lot of attention is put in the way the characters clothing sits on their bodies and the dirtiness of daily life.  The story can be hard to follow at times and things get easily lost or forgotten.  I read this in one sitting and would be really confused if it would have been broken up.  Even with all of the characters and events fresh, there were some sequences that I needed to reread or pause a moment on to recall everything that was taking place.  Part of the problem is from jumping back and forth in time throughout the story.  Other problems deal with trying to figure out who is who between the different time periods or what character is talking at certain points.  Other times there are scenes were the actions are more hinted at then outright explained so the reader has to come to a conclusion on their own as to what has taken place.  Some of these scenes are pivotal to the overall development of the story as well.  Even after reading it all and pondering over it and working at connecting all of the dots, I feel there are still some aspects I am not connecting properly or picking up on completely.  It might be worth a reread and perhaps building a chart to detail each character and what rolls specifically they play in both parts of the story. 

    This is an intriguing but wholly depressing story.  Everything is intertwined and throughout characters surface in unexpected places and their actions and rolls don’t always reveal themselves until later in the story.  Through the entire thing, even up to the end, you are left with a dread and a feeling that humanity is really despicable.  If I had one complaint, it would be the feeling that the story ended too abruptly.  Part of that could be from lingering confusion as to the final outcome with a few of the pivotal players, part of that could be that’s the way it ended and you have to just take it as it is.  The series really reminded me of a cross between Higurashi no Naku Koro ni and Manhole.  If you are a fan of dark stories laying bare the sinister side of humanity then you will enjoy this convoluted and complex story of unruly children.  The tankobon is available commercially in North America and was released by a company called Fantagraphics Books.