The Fall 2017 Manga Guide

Imperfect Girl

What's It About? 

“This is not a tale. This is an event and an incident.” So warns the unnamed protagonist and the narrator of Imperfect Girl, a college student who spends his ample free time reading mystery novels nobody cares about and writing manuscripts nobody reads. An unskilled scribbler who dismisses himself as merely a “liar” rather a writer, he soon bears witness to a fatal traffic accident that also reveals a deeply unsettling aspect to one of its surviving victims. Taken captive by her in retaliation for witnessing her in an unguarded moment, he now finds himself locked in her closet and forced to confront not only the terror of his own scenario, but the truth of his own character and his own desires.

A brand new collaboration between artist Mitsuru Hattori and fan-favorite writer NISIOSIN, Imperfect Girl is now available from Vertical Comics for $12.95.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Austin Price

Rating: 2

Imperfect Girl hangs too heavy a conceit on too light a support, with the result that nothing about it feels right. The scene of a young girl ignoring her friend's death long enough to save a videogame and then feigning –- or perhaps not – grief is absolutely fit subject for a story, but it seems more the domain of a sensitive study of urban alienation in the vein of a Shuzo Oshimi piece than the catalyst for a kidnapping as it is in this new mystery from the team of writer NISIOSIN and artist Mitsuru Hattori. It's a psychological horror caper where none of the characters seems remotely realized and where the horrors seem less the stuff of nightmares than the set-up to a stupid joke the punchline of which never arrives.

So much of that has to do with just how labored the movements of plot and character are. There's little reason our nameless narrator resigns himself to captivity at the hands of a young girl when he knows very well salvation is a phone call away. Even if all the dithering and fretting and thousand excuses he offers about how he wants to help the girl are intended to show how indecisive he is and how much he fears being judged, to develop his character, none of it is convincing. Similarly so a moment where the narrator's lack of proper manners sets his young captor off. They're both dull characters, their situation is risible, and yet artist Mitsuru Hattori treats their internal and external circumstances as if they were terrifying. It's all so much ado about nothing.

Admittedly, this may all be the point. NISIOISIN is a writer who has deeply internalized the rules of mystery fiction and so loves to delay for ages on paying off long-standing questions of how and why until the last possible moment. It's possible that everything that seems asinine now will reveal itself intentional so. It's also possible that greater revelation will reveal that the tortured artistic framing is all worthwhile in the face of the horrors hiding in this tale. This is framed as commentary offered by our nameless narrator years after the fact, after all; it makes sense that the one recounting these events would distort them in the telling based on things we do not yet know.

Yet the fact is even if this is all intentional, none of it feels believable. Mitsuru Hattori's willingness to twist the language of page composition and comics vocabulary certainly complement NISIOISN's elaborate, recursive, wordy, playful approach to storytelling, but it does the story's substance no favors. It lends these events a menace they've done nothing to earn, invests these non-people with a hint of substance that belies how they're less realized characters than props in an elaborate game put together by bored artists interested in proving something about their own distorted private theories of behavior.

All of which seems par for the course with NISIOISN, whose work always seems created solely to “teach” readers something of how they should view the world. He's a bizarrely instructive writer for whom art seems nothing but a vehicle for “lessons” that bear little upon reality, and Imperfect Girl seems like nothing but the latest build to another such instructive example. Somehow, I don't think it will prove as edifying as the author hopes.

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Amy McNulty

Rating:

NISIOISIN is often associated with drawn-out conversations and monologues as well as mysteries full of twists and turns. In the first volume of Imperfect Girl, readers will find both to an extent. This manga adaptation of one of his horror novels is perhaps less heavy on dialogue than is typical for the author by nature of one of the main characters, but there's plenty of internal monologue on behalf of the unnamed protagonist, a college student and aspiring novelist, to make NISIOISIN's touch clear. There are virtually no characters outside of the narrator and U, the elementary school girl with sociopathic and violent tendencies, and the story quickly descends into a battle of wills between the two. The narrator, unable to achieve his goals of publication, describes himself as an outsider and loner, but he has a sense of empathy about him that drives his interactions with U to an unreasonable degree. NISIOISIN “solves” the cell phone problem many contemporary mystery and horror writers face, i.e., “Why can't someone just call for help?”, not with the commonly used “no signal” solution, but with the narrator's desire to cause minimum emotional damage to the psychotic young girl who's kidnapped him at knifepoint and locked him in a closet. He could call the police but doesn't because he fears if the authorities get involved, her fragile psyche will descend further into darkness.

His intentions are noble, but it's still difficult to believe even after he's been stuck in the closet for almost a day with no food or water that he'll still wait for the parents to come home—the parents he early on realizes aren't coming. Then there's the fact that he has several opportunities to evade her on the way from his apartment to her house, but he doesn't, for fear of causing a scene and out of curiosity. The story wouldn't exist without these strange decisions, but they still take the reader out of the moment because of their sheer fallacy. Still, U is an intriguing antagonist, a child without emotion who speaks softly and acts especially surprisingly at the end of the volume. Though her terrorizing relies partially on the narrator's unbelievable cooperation with her plans, she's still effectively scary.

Hattori's art lends the story a dark and foreboding atmosphere, which truly adds to the tension of the piece. It does have a rough, almost sketch-like, quality to it, and dark backgrounds and screentones are overused, but both elements help paint the picture of the horror at work. A lot of U's menace is conveyed through her eyes and Hattori does an amazing job of framing her darkest moments based on her expression alone.

Imperfect Girl volume 1 sets up an intriguing mystery and horror story that's not overly graphic thus far. Though hindered by some poor plot choices, it does manage to surprise. Fans of mystery and NISIOISIN's other works will want to snatch up this first volume.

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Lynzee Loveridge

Rating:

There are few socio-behavioral concepts considered more important to maintaining peace in Japanese society than "honne and tatemae". The idea postulates that individuals have a true self (honne) and then the self they present outwardly to society (tatemae). The latter is usually governed by social responsibilities and expectations and as one would expect, conflict and pressure between the two can cause great stress to a person. In NisiOisin and Mitsuru Hattori's Imperfect Girl, the need to maintain honne, that mask everyone wears, is taken to an extreme possibly to illustrate the damage living a facade can do to a child.

The book's protagonist is an aspiring novelist whose continued failures to be professionally published are crushing his confidence. He's skipping his college courses, he's becoming lax about his personal hygiene, and he regularly engages in negative self-talk. He's becoming embroiled into a cycle of self-loathing but he hasn't given up yet. In fact, readers find out quickly that the crazy events that begin to take over his life become his inspiration. The back of the book even reads like maybe all of this actually happened to NisiOisin when he was college. I mean, probably not. But maybe. Opposite our author is a grade school girl dubbed “U” who becomes the victim of a tragedy, but she doesn't react how she's supposed. The author sees her. He becomes a witness to her less than pleasant honne and soon comes to learn that this slip of U's mask is unforgivable in her eyes. U is very, very concerned about maintaining social graces.

NisiOisin has crafted another compelling character drama underneath extreme circumstances. Imperfect Girl feels like something from the Monogatari canon, minus the supernatural elements. The scrawling thought texts fill panels when the author is overwhelmed in the same way text is used as a visual medium in Monogatari. NisiOisin seems to recognize this, immediately opening the manga with “This is Not a Tale” as if to reassure readers that this isn't that despite its appearance.

Unfortunately what it does have in common is NisiOisin's fixation on sexualizing elementary school girls. U is supposed to be creepy and menacing, and she is. But she's also drawn with glossy lips set as a frame's central focus when she appears on the page. Full body shots render her with accentuated, elongated back curve that thrusts her non-existent chest forward and hips out. The posing is pretty common in American and Japanese comics alike, just the subject is usually a buxom superhero instead of a grade schooler with her recorder. The writer and artist's choice to pair U's unstable mental state with some kind of burgeoning sexuality is probably meant to make her seem even more dangerous to the reader. She doesn't canonically do anything sexual in this first volume, this is just signaling in the same way the cover artwork is crudely phallic.

Imperfect Girl is taking an interesting course through the psychology of honne and tatemae, if you can move past some of the manga's less savory predilections.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Imperfect Girl may make personal history as the first NisiOisiN series I don't actively dislike. Written in a much less self-conscious style than is typical for him, Imperfect Girl presents us with a heroine who is as flawed as they come – a grade schooler who stops to save her video game before putting on a show of grief when her friend is mowed down in one of those runaway truck incidents that are the leading cause of death in anime and manga. When she realizes that the unnamed narrator has seen her, she kidnaps the college student at knife point after sabotaging his ride to school in order to procure his name, address, and house key…and I got the impression that if he had died as a result of her throwing her school recorder into his bike wheel, she wouldn't have cared. She's basically the terrifying non-childlike child who has been making horror and effective genre for some time now, but what tempers her typicality is the fact that she's unfailingly, ritualistically, polite. Once we learn this, it seems less like she didn't care that her friend was dead and more that she had to save her game because someone drilled it into her head that that's what you do…and made her afraid not to follow the rules.

That the narrator, even before his from-the-future narration begins to employ hindsight, realizes that this is likely due to something her parents have done to her. His first assumption is that she's merely broken in some way, taking an outsized revenge for a small issue, and alluding to her simply being “misunderstood” by the world around her. His fears of calling the police to save himself because she'll possibly end up in the dreaded system feel ridiculous to the reader, but from the limited amounts he tells us about his own childhood, it seems like he may have a decent reason for his concerns – that he, himself, was at some point under the care of a government or medical facility that scarred him.

What all of this boils down to is that no one in this first of three volumes feels reliable. The narrator flat-out calls himself a liar when he admits to being an aspiring writer rather than a real author, which ought to cast doubt on his narration of events. The girl is clearly untrustworthy as a child without visible parents who exhibits none of the markers of emotional normalcy. Even the author's younger self, whose story is being told, feels unreliable as he fails to take any sort of realistic action to save himself, instead choosing to identify with his captor. Wherever the story is going, chances are it won't be good, no matter how the players depict it.

As long as the main character doesn't turn out to be the author himself and the whole series a metaphor for the art of writing fiction, this should be interesting. I don't entirely trust NisiOisiN as an author, but Mitsuru Hattori's dark, alarming artwork makes up for my reserve in this manga version of the original novel. Simply put, I'm leery, but this is definitely a series I'll be picking up a second volume of.