The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

Back When You Called Us Devils

What's It About? 

Yusuke Saito is a normal high school kid...well, normal enough, though there's six months missing out of his memory. But when he starts to get confronted by people who insist they're from his past, who allege that he did horrible things to them...suddenly Yusuke realizes that those missing six months may be crucial to remember. Otherwise, the skeletons in his closet may just make him a skeleton, too...

Back When You Called Us Devils is drawn by Takashi Sano and Kodansha Comics released its first volume on May 25







Content Warning for rape, bullying, abuse

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating: Um

There is something uniquely uncomfortable about Back When You Called Us Devils. It seems to be on purpose. The story follows Yusuke Saito, a high school first year who vanished for six months and was found – naked, bound, and unconscious – in a rowboat floating off the coast. He has no memories before that time, and that may be deliberate on his part, because for all three years of middle school, Yusuke was the worst of the worst.

Rape. Maiming. Bullying. Possibly even murder. There's apparently no limit to what Yusuke used to get up to, and it seems as if he had the perfect parent manners to somehow keep it all under wraps as well – his mother certainly doesn't seem as if she was at all aware of what he used to get up to. Of course, that assumes that this is, in fact, the truth about his past; there's definitely something a little off about the entire tortured legacy he's reputed to have created. The stories are almost too lurid and horrible, like something out of a low-rent horror film from the 50s about the terrible things teens do if you leave them unsupervised. Yes, there are a lot of people telling Yusuke that he used to be a horrible person. But the fact that he can't remember them and only has one partial piece of information at his disposal may indicate that he's not the devil they're all telling him he is.

That's the real crux of the matter with this book. If Yusuke is the victim, we need to know why. But if Yusuke was the perpetrator, we can't feel sorry for what he's going through now. It creates a volume that raises more discomfiting questions than solid answers, keeping us off balance with every new reveal. It's graphic, unsettling, and downright triggering as well, so definitely keep your own comfort level and emotional needs in mind before deciding to pick this up. It's about a mystery that almost doesn't bear solving, because whatever the answer is, it's bound to be terrible.

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Lynzee Loveridge
Rating: --

This story left me incredibly conflicted in a way that will probably bother me for the rest of the day. I'll lead with the only compliment I can, and that's that I very much like the art style used here. It reminds me a bit of Inio Asano and the tone is, at least at first, similar to Flowers of Evil. The story, however, is best summed up as torture porn masquerading as depth.

Our boy Yusuke is a shitbag. He used to be a sociopathic monster but a convenient bout of amnesia has caused him to forget that he and his equally psychotic friend (whom he may have groomed to that point) apparently tortured any kid they could get their hands on and sexually assaulted any girl they crossed paths with, all the while raising no alarms to the middle school staff or their parents. Most of their crimes were committed in an abandoned schoolhouse but Yusuke, now devoid of the responsibility of memory, remembers nothing except that maybe he murdered someone there. His teen "innocence" has been reinstated and most of the book is spent with him attempting to maintain it. It's actually not hard to see how he ended up committing the acts he did because even with a fresh slate, Yusuke shows that he has very little regard for others or anything resembling a real conscience.

Sano tries to entice readers with a graphic and gritty mystery story. The hope is you'll want so badly to know how our sex offender prodigy ended up mindwiped in a boat that you'll follow along as his buddy attempts to get him back on the torture wagon again. Do you want to flip through pages of some punk kid basking in the glory days of ruining other kids' lives? Do you want detailed accounts of that kind of depravity followed by villainous Joker laughter? How about ending the volume with Yusuke deciding that between not raping a woman or his demented former friend assaulting his girlfriend and livestreaming it, he chooses option A? Those are the kinds of scenarios you can expect from Back When You Called Us Devils. Personally, I've never cared less about some fictional violent sadist's life.