The Fall 2020 Manga Guide

Sadako at the End of the World

What's It About? 

The world has ended. Humanity isn't completely destroyed but it is a shadow of its former glory. A pair of sisters are surviving together in the ruins when they discover an ancient relic: a video. The tape is none other than Sadako's video that will curse anyone who watches it and kill them one week later. The girls are unfazed when Sadako appears since meeting another human is rare anyway. Instead, the little girls call her "Sada-chan." Sadako, meanwhile, thinks if there are more people left, she'd like to curse them. So Sadako and the two girls begin travelling together to find more people.

Sadako at the End of the World is drawn and scripted by Koma Natsumi., with Kōji Suzuki supervising the story. Yen Press will release both print and digital versions of the manga on November 17 for $15.00 and $6.99 respectively

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Sadako at the End of the World is an odd book. It's part comedy, part horror, and perhaps more bitter than sweet as it follows Sadako of The Ring fame on a road trip in a post-apocalyptic world. How does she end up in an apocalypse? Two girls (possibly sisters?) named Ai and Hii manage to fix an old VCR and the only tape that will play is Sadako's. She comes out of the screen like she's supposed to, but the girls have no idea who she is or that they've been cursed. In fact, they're just really excited to see another living human, because it seems very much like they haven't since their father…died? Left?

There are a lot of unknowns here. We're not sure what happened to the girls' dad or the world in general, or even how long it's been since the world basically ended. The beautician they meet still has electricity in his salon and had vaguely heard of Sadako, and the old woman they encounter in another town has photos of her adult daughter dancing in a recital and used to be an actress, so it may only be within the most recent generation that things went wrong. That it was possibly a disease (or zombies) is also on the table, because when the old woman learns that her daughter's house is now empty, she comments that it hit there, too.

What this means for Sadako is that her time as a curse is perhaps almost over. It's hard to tell if she's happy about that or not, because she does keep killing along the way and tells the girls that she's only got a week to spend with them. There's a weird, humorous edge to the story because of this – because the girls don't know the Sadako story, they look at her as a new friend they're spending a week with, and plenty of antics ensue, from trying to get Sadako a haircut to Sadako using her powers to project the setting for “Hansel and Gretel” on the old woman's house so that they can act out the story. (Sadako is Hansel, if you're wondering.) There's also a sort of bittersweet suggestion that being killed by Sadako might not be a tragedy in this end-of-the-world she's been summoned to, because if in a week the girls only find two other people, that's not a good sign that they'll find many more, especially since the old woman's daughter appears to have died recently.

The art here is softer than you might expect and works surprisingly well, with plenty of notes, like a Sadako timeline, history, and the creator's trip to the set of the most recent film. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it, but I think I enjoyed reading it and it's different enough from almost anything else that it's worth checking out, if only for the novelty.

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Caitlin Moore

Rating:

There's a particular subgenre of apocalyptic fiction proliferating in anime and manga that I'm not sure has a particular name, but I think of it as “soft apocalypse”. Unlike the brutal, ravaged wastelands of, say, Mad Max, young girls wander the ruined landscape in search of others, connecting briefly with those they meet, and then continuing on their journey to nowhere in particular. They imbue the prospect of the end of the world with a sense of melancholic beauty, the breakdown of society bringing a gentle loneliness instead of savagery. Sadako-chan at the End of the World asks, what if The Ring's Sadako manifested in this kind of world, when VHS tapes are all but extinct?

What we get is a kinder, gentler Sadako, who connects with these young girls but is still bound by the rules of her existence as a curse. She finds a loophole that allows her to spare the children, but that doesn't change that the people they encounter are still meeting the Sadako of legend, and that doesn't spell good news for them. That exact juxtaposition – the horror of Sadako combined with the beauty of those brief moments of human connection – adds an unsettling cast to the story that makes this short manga stand out from the others.

Its brief length – only 120 pages not counting extras at the end – both works for and against it. The gimmick, while used to decent effect, doesn't have a lot of staying power and would have worn thin very quickly if the series lasted much longer. On the other hand, that means they only have a couple of encounters with living humans before the end. The best parts have to do with the little girls trying to glean knowledge of civilization and culture from the few fragments they can find, filling in the gaps as best they can. If they watched a VHS tape and Sadako came out, that of course means that's just what normally happens with a tape! It's a cute window into how children think.