Title: The Morose Mononokean
Genre: Supernatural, slice of life
Publisher: Square-Enix (JP), Crunchyroll (US)
Artist/Writer: Kiri Wazawa
Serialized in: Gangan Online
Original Release Date: July 5, 2015
Title: Crunchyroll is picking up more and more manga these days and they have a very nicely varied catalog by this point. There’s action, romance, and stories that cross the low-key feeling of a slice of life with more fantastical elements, which I always find tremendously fun. I’m always interested in stories about spirits, gods, ayakashi, mushi, yokai, and mononoke; I read a lot of supernatural American stories but manga just seems to have a bigger variety of different, weird creatures. For the sake of this review, since all of those words have so many different possible translations, I’m going to stick with the word mononoke to describe all of the strange creatures here, even if it is a little bit of a mouthful.
Ashiya has missed the first week of school due to illness, and now he’s panicking about making any friends at his new high school. He’s also panicking about how to get a hitchhiking mononokean off of his back; it’s making him lethargic and prone to passing out! He’s so desperate that he calls the number scrawled on a poster in the nurse’s office for an exorcist, and lo and behold someone responds. Ashiya doesn’t realize it at first but grumpy exorcist Abeno is his classmate. In addition to having some strange abilities, like being able to summon a moveable tea room that transports them to anywhere with a door, Abeno can also summon the gates to the underworld to exorcise a mononoke through. He’s a little swamped actually; now that Ashiya can suddenly see mononoke he’s realizing just how many of them there are, so he takes on his classmate as an apprentice/errand-runner to help lighten the load and hopefully not get the two of them eaten in the process.
In my mind there are a few general categories for mononoke (and ayakashi etc) stories: There are the ones that read more like general fantasy where the mononoke are bad and need to be killed or exorcised. Sometimes you’ll have “good” ones, like familiars, but usually in these stories there is a lot of action scenes and exorcisms. On the flip side, you have the stories where the mononoke are a pest but not a threat, and the characters live with them and learn a lot about themselves and the human world through the lens of these creatures’ own lives. It’s the difference between say Blue Exorcist, where devils and demons come to the human world with the express purpose of causing havoc, and Natsume Yuujinchou where exorcisms do happen but aren’t the answer for many of the problems in the story. In four chapters this story has already had two exorcisms, but it leans more towards the more gentle side as far as stories go. Abeno chides Ashiya for looking at the creatures just as monsters and for not trying to see them as beings with reason and emotions. In his defense, Ashiya does adapt rather quickly and doesn’t panic as much upon seeing the mononoke, and they do look truly odd and strange here — a constant visual reminder that they’re not human — so this isn’t going to be an easy part-time job for him.
The volume ends on a bit of a cliffhanger as Ashiya goes off to complete a new task, but I must admit I’m worried. In the description on the Crunchyroll page it says, “This is volume 1 of the mysterious stories involving the very morose owner of Mononokean guiding the youkai that happened to wander into this world go to the next world” which makes it sound as if we won’t be getting the other three volumes and beyond (although there is a translated preview for volume two at the very end and it includes a preview of the series’ third main character, going by the description on the Gangan Online website). Now CR can be a little sporadic in their updates when catching up to an on-going series, but I really want more of this; Gangan Online website only displays the latest chapter at any given time so this is really the only way to read it. Fingers crossed that the summary is partially a placeholder text and we get more of this fun, bittersweet series soon!!
