Ajiro Shinpei dreams of his childhood friend Ushio. In his dream, she asks him to protect her sister Mio. Startled awake, Shinpei falls face first into a large-chested woman on the ferry to Hitogashima with him, who slaps him for his trouble. At home, Mio greets him, but a small bicycle accident give Shinpei a glimpse of her underwear. None of this seems important, but it will be. It will become the first of the signs that something here is not right at all.

We learn about Ushio's death, and the mysteries surrounding it, when Shinpei's old friend Sou tries to explain that Ushio may have been murdered. The next morning the family of the girl Ushio saved has disappeared. Strange marks are showing up on the ground in town. And people around him seem not right somehow. Shinpei follows Mio into the hills below the local shrine where he comes across a women he's seen before -the woman from the ferry. Only now, this woman is holding a gun and its trained on Mio! Mio shoots the woman...and then she turns on Shinpei.

When Shinpei comes to on the morning he returned to the island, he knows that whatever is going on has consequences way beyond Ushio's funeral. He can't tell if the people around him are real or shadows. But he knows that every time he is killed, time resets and he has another chance to solve the mystery.

The first volume of Summer Time Rendering is a can't-put-down kind of read. Once the plot took hold, I knew I was in for the whole journey. As Shinpei comes closer to the truth, the details run ahead of what we know, drawing us into a paranormal story with dark intent.

There is quite a lot of violence in this volume; characters are killed in several ways, most quite messily, but the violence is temporary, as Shinpei's death resets the story once again. To what point, though, we don't find out until the end of the volume, which adds yet another mystery.

Both art and story present a nice balance between the people, the setting, the action, and the horror. Heavy line weight in the action and horror scenes lends a darkness to all of the underlying mystery, while the daily life scenes are so innocuous that one could be forgiven for wanting to visit this pleasant little island.

The only discordant note is the fanservice. If you are among that percentage of people whom fanservice serves, rest assured that all the main female characters have the requisite amount of T and A in the right places. Girls wear bathing suits and take showers, boobs are big, underwear is striped, God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. If like me, you find fanservice an insistent hand waving in your face while you're just trying to read, dammit, I can assure you that the plot is strong enough that Summer Time Rendering is still worth reading. It's very easy to convince me to read a new manga series; it's much more difficult to convince me to keep reading after all the major female characters have been pointlessly reduced to breast comments and crotch shots. And ultimately, Summer Time Rendering's combination of mystery, action, and horror kept me reading until I completed this 366-page volume in one sitting. Shinpei and his friends are driven to learn the truth, and now, I am as well. I'll definitely be reading (and, hopefully, reviewing!) Volume 2.

Volume 1 of Summer Time Rendering by Yasuki Tanaka will be released in English on May 31, 2022 by Udon Entertainment. A 25-episode anime directed by Ayumu Watanabe (Komi Can't Communicate, Space Brothers) will debut on April 14, streaming on Disney+. The completed manga is also available on Shueisha's MANGA Plus platform.