The Spring 2023 Manga Guide

Boy's Abyss

What's It About? 

Reiji's life is as miserable as the small town he can't escape. The most interesting thing that's ever happened there is a double suicide down by the river. Does Reiji have any power over his fate, or will he too fall into the abyss?

Reiji's mother is checked out, he's stuck caring for his grandmother with dementia, and his childhood friend treats him like a lackey. Then beautiful, big-city pop star Nagi miraculously shows up working the counter at the local convenience store. Reiji is starstruck. When she offers him the ultimate way out of his claustrophobic existence, will he succumb to temptation…?

Boy's Abyss has story and art by Ryo Minenami, with English translation by John Werry, lettering and touch-up by Stephen Dutro. Viz will release its first volume both digitally and physically on April 25.

Content warning: this manga deals with the discussion of mental illness and suicide.

Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

As a rule, I tend to shirk the pretense of the "Sad Teenage Boy" genre of story. And Boy's Abyss certainly does have some pretense to it, dropping us with a book-based cold open of over fifty pages before we even get the table of contents. It all hinges on setting up our main boy Reiji's small-town sad-times circumstances, and the temptations brought on by his favorite idol just happening to arrive in his life with offers of sex and suicide. It quickly begs the question of if this can actually match the sharp, self-aware discomfort of the commentary in something like The Flowers of Evil, or if it's going to devolve into the alternating mopey wish-fulfillment and misery porn of so many shallower imitators.

To its credit, Boy's Abyss actually does seem to remember to make itself entertaining more than it's just trying to speak to the idealized angst of teenage boys. There's a knowing absurdity to the way the core premise of the messed-up relationship Reiji finds himself entangled in unfolds. Disaffected pop star temptress Nagi mostly exists at the behest of that sex-and-suicide fantasy, though I appreciate how she quickly proves to be her own flavor of entertaining weirdo. And Ryo Minenami can pace out art effectively, including at least one neat visual move during Reiji and Nagi's sex scene, even if the intent of the metaphor is the hilariously stupid realization of "What if women…are people?!" Capping off the initial rendezvous between the pair with the punch-line of Nagi's older husband dryly strolling in makes for an expertly-deployed sputter-worthy moment. It embodies the absurdity of teenage confusion in these situations that culminate in Reiji having a sad wank while thinking about Nagi's suicide pact offer in the context of "No one has ever said anything so nice to me before". There's no way this book wants us to take all this that seriously deep.

Unfortunately, Boy's Abyss can't keep that kind of consistent entertainment value all the way through, and does backslide into more standard practices for this setup as it goes on. For most of it, I couldn't really buy one of the main conflicts about Reiji considering abandoning his mother in their comically crappy home life. And only then in the last few pages are we supposed to be swayed by Reiji's intrusive insinuation that his mother is actually taking advantage of him in the situation, mostly coming off as an insincere rationalization. With only the manipulations of everyone else in his life to push him through plot points then (and not enough appearances in this volume by Reiji's friend Chako, who is honestly great), and preview text for Volume Two indicating that flavor will continue, it doesn't inspire much confident curiosity for following this one.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

There's angst, and then there's the angst that wallows in its own misery. I'm inclined to call Boy's Abyss the latter – it's so full of horrors that they all blur together like wet newsprint. It's not enough that Reiji's older brother is a shut-in, he's an abusive shut-in who hurls imprecations at their mother. His grandmother's senile and incontinent, his former best friend's a bully, and when his favorite pop idol shows up in his town, she's keen to make a suicide pact with him. It's simply too much, and the sting of any one of these things is dulled by the sheer weight of all of them thrown together.

Despite all of that, it's hard not to feel bad for Reiji. Having found myself in the position of caretaker two years ago, I know how draining it is, and it's difficult not to empathize with Reiji's feeling of his life no longer being under his own control, or with his mother, desperate for any sort of reprieve. No one makes their best decisions in those headspaces, and Reiji's feeling like his mother no longer is acting like a parent even as he prepares to become a breadwinner rather than a university student does a good job of showing his conflicting emotions and expectations. Only his friend Chako seems to notice or care, but he's not sure what to do with that. In another story, he'd lean on her. In this one, he starts to think that his idol's suicide pact might be the way to go.

It's overwhelmingly dark to the point where it starts to feel contrived. There are some solid moments, with one striking visual during the sex scene (which could be construed as statutory rape), and the imagery of the town itself is so worn down and frayed at the edges that it both works and also exacerbates the issues with the story. The dedication, if it is that, and not text that's part of the story, may indicate that the creator is writing this from a personal place, and I tried to keep that in mind while reading. But overall this is simply too much and I was relieved to put it behind me.

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

Boy's Abyss is a story about intense self-loathing and ennui. There's a moment where one of the characters reveals that their singular pet fish is named “Nagi”, spelled with the symbols for “the doldrums”--it's extremely on-the-nose for this manga, but the bluntness has a charm to it, and it's the single biggest takeaway you can take from this series. Rei's constant self-loathing and the misery he's surrounded by only complicates further when Nagi sinks her claws into her. While for many, self-destruction is loud and ostentatious (think Flowers of Evil), here it's much subtler and venomous. Much digital ink has been spilled about the toxic nature of idol culture in Japan, and Nagi is a phenomenal testament to that. And even poor Rei, desperate for interaction, isn't so desperate as to prefer the artifice of Nagi's stage persona to the woman in the outfit.

Unfortunately, the woman underneath is complicated and maybe even a little manipulative, and she's not even the only source of love in his life. After a lifetime of misery on Rei's behalf, he's gone and gotten himself involved with just another manipulator. There's potentially an undercurrent of sexism from Rei, given that his friend Chako has also shown him plenty of kindness but he hasn't demonstrated any interest in her (and she's decidedly not conventionally attractive, even she laments being chubby). But it could just as easily be due to Rei not having a sexual awakening before Nagi.

Boy's Abyss deals with a lot of nasty, dark emotions, and a lot of that hinges on Rei's relationship with women. But there's good drama here, and like any trainwreck, it's hard to look away. Recommended, with some minor reservations.

MrAJCosplay

Rating:

I genuinely thought that this was a complete story that would begin and end with this one volume. That is not the case even though almost everything was pointing to that and I'm curious to see if that was the right call or not. I am definitely going to be checking out more of this series in the future because it's the type of book that I feel is very difficult to put down once it grips you. Boys Abyss follows the life of a boy who, from the first page, you can tell is stuck between a rock and a hard place. His family life isn't great, he often feels like he's used by everyone around him, and even though there's technically nothing completely stopping him from leaving his backwater town and all of the people that make his life hell, you get the sense that he's been so beaten down to this point that he doesn't really have anything worth living for. But there is a huge difference between not having something to live for and having a reason to die which is one of the most powerful messages within the book as our main character comes across others who might be in circumstances just as bad if not worse than him. It's a story about trying to make the best of the situation that you're in and understanding why some people feel powerless when they're already in that type of situation.

This is the type of book that will make you feel terrible when you are done reading it. That is an accolade for how well-paced and how well-written the story is. It is slow with many scenes not having a lot of dialogue and it is very mature, dealing with subjects like suicide, family neglect, and potential sexual abuse. However, while these elements are presented in a way that does not feel subtle in the least, it doesn't feel like the book is glorifying these elements either. These are shocking and upsetting things to deal with and I fully empathize with every character even if I don't know their full story. After what felt like a defining moment at the end of the volume, I can't help but wait until I get to experience more of this depressing roller coaster.