The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

A School Frozen in Time

What's It About? 

On a snowy school day like any other, classmates and childhood friends Hiroshi and Mizuki arrive at school to find the campus eerily empty. Before long, they find themselves trapped inside with six other friends, and even stranger, all the clocks have stopped at a very specific moment -- the exact time when a former classmate jumped off the school roof to their death three months earlier. It turns out that this departed friend is their way out of their current predicament and may even be among their group... but no one can remember who it was that took their life on that sad day. The students must face themselves and their past memories to piece together the identity of this suicide victim or risk a similar fate — with their lives lost and forgotten inside these frigid school walls.

A School Frozen in Time is based on a three-volume novel series by Mizuki Tsujimura, which Kodansha published in 2004 along with a two-volume re-release in 2007. Naoshi Arakawa launched the manga adaptation in Kodansha's Monthly Shōnen Magazine in December 2007, and both the paperback and digital versions of the first volume is available at Kodansha Comics for $9.88 and $7.99 respectively

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Although A School Frozen in Time mentions ideas of the Looking-Glass World, Doraemon, Stephen King's The Langoliers, and the legendary ghost ship Mary Celeste, if there's one story this manga's first volume is likely to bring to mind it's Another. Like in that work, this features a group of students in the same class who know that one of their classmates is dead, but cannot recall who it is – or even if it's one of them. All they can recall is that several months ago, during the school festival, someone jumped from the roof and died. They're assuming right now that that person was one of them, a student in their friend group, but there's enough going on that it's easy to see how thinking that might just be a diversion to keep themselves from remembering whatever the painful truth might be.

As a horror setup, it's remarkably effective. There are certainly elements of all of the works referenced, both directly and indirectly, that we can spot – there could be a time pocket (like in the King story), a supernatural element (like in Another), a parallel mirror-world, or even just an inexplicable mystery destined never to be solved, as in the case of the Mary Celeste. This book adds to its atmosphere the device of the endless snowy day, which gives the entire, empty school the air of existing in a different time and place, one packed away in cotton wool with the sounds of reality muffled. The idea of being "put away" also works with the theme of time standing still – the cast realizes at some point that not only are they unable to leave the building, but that all of the clocks and their watches have stopped at 5:53 pm – the exact time of the suicide. That coupled with the messages found reading or saying “Do you remember?” suggest that more than just a life was lost at that precise time, and that that's the moment when everyone's world should have started to stand still. This idea of movement, of going forward, is also almost certainly what triggers the clock to start again, albeit briefly; one student moves ahead with something he's kept to himself for years. Did that cause his death? Or his escape? Is there really any way to know?

Right now I'm betting that there's more going on than anyone realizes, and that the teacher, who is absent from the school but very present in everyone's minds, has more to do with it. The fact that we never see his face and that he was clearly integral to the class' sense of self seems to indicate that he's somehow behind all of this, or at least more involved. Is he the one who died? Or did losing a student send him over the edge? Whatever the case, I'm hooked – and not holding out any that rather than any of the stories mentioned above this isn't actually Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit.

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Lynzee Loveridge

Rating:

Okay, so I have what might be an unpopular opinion. First, I'll start by saying that I've seen Your Lie in April and although Farewell, My Dear Cramer is suffering from some production shortcuts, I'd describe both as having attractive character designs. I have not, however, read their manga counterparts so this is my first experience with Arakawa's work in person.

Well, there's really no getting around this but I came away from A School Frozen in Time thinking the art was awful. The characters and perspective are often wrong in the way I'd expect from an amateur still learning how to draw the same thing from different angles consistently. After I double-checked the names on this, I found that I was gaslighting myself. How could Arakawa's art be bad? Is it actually ME who is the amateur here? Should I hang up my officially issued 'anime opinion haver' hat and go home?

But as I turned each page, my initial impressions were reinforced again and again. Faces took on a Picasso-like quality as eyes floated away from one another and bodies were rendered in painful angles. I was saved only by differences between characters' hair that was, thankfully, different enough in style and shading so they couldn't be mistaken from one another.

My opinion of the manga is bolstered by its story, a horror tale focusing on the eight students who found themselves stuck in some kind of time rift. They enter school one day but find it is abandoned and are unable to leave. Watches and clocks stop, objects disappear at random, and none of them can remember the student that killed themselves on the roof a few months ago. The manga is playing with larger themes of memory and what it means to really “die” with added supernatural elements. I found the story and emotional beats strong enough that I'll likely keep reading this manga despite the artwork. Others might find it too distracting to ignore.