Title: Good-bye Geist
Genre: Drama, Suspense
Publisher: GEN (US)
Artist: Ryo Hanada
Translation: Julianne Neville
Original Release Date: January 1, 2013
Reading Good-bye Geist feels a lot like opening up the middle of a new book and just going with it from there. While that’s not to say the story at hand is uninteresting or poorly told, it does bring to light some flaws in formatting and the sometimes unfortunate side effects of writing a one-shot.
Good-bye Geist follows the story of one high-school girl named Yuki, who, like many young Japanese women, is occasionally molested on the train she takes to and from school. What’s worse is that there’s a boy on the train who appears to be filming her with his camera phone. Throw in a mysterious serial animal killer who leaves cat corpses around school, and we have the basic drama and suspense that is Good-bye Geist.
The plot sounds gripping, interesting, potentially graphic and scary, but the formatting does it no favors and ultimately what we are left with is an unfinished, disappointing teaser of a story. Most of the scenes are repetitive, either occurring on the train or the classroom. Any horror fan knows that the key to successfully creeping out or terrifying your audience has a lot to do with atmosphere and mood. (Anyone who has read House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski knows what I’m talking about.) Good-bye Geist fails in that regard. The train, despite its obvious potential–traveling through a dark tunnel, a shadowy figure in the crowd, the sheer oppressive and anxiety-triggering congestion of the hordes of people–is just an ordinary train, much like the classroom that’s a plain ole classroom.
The emptiness in the panels can be staggering.
None of this would really be a problem if the story didn’t continually wave the whole cat killer subplot in front of the audience’s faces the entire time. Without that, Good-bye Geist could be a successful portrait of real life as a high school student, taking its time addressing some of the more disturbing yet pervasive elements of Japanese society (train molestation), and maybe throw in some half-baked indie romance story to tie it all together. It would have been just fine that way, poetic even. But the story keeps pushing at this mysterious cat killer, tantalizing its readers with little hints and clues–the opening scene implies Yuki is the one killing a cat in the woods, but Matsubara seems to be the primary target later on. The mystery is never quite solved, or at least not in a satisfying way. It could have been drawn out much longer with more detail and drama. As it stands, it feels like background noise to the more interesting story between Yuki and Matsubara.
A rare example of background.
Good-bye Geist, after its conclusion, still has a lot of explaining to do. Perhaps if it was given a little more time, a longer length, and a sterner editing eye, the story it attempted could have been pulled off with some finesse. This one volume work feels rushed and unfinished, although it does have potential in an interesting school drama mystery and the understated personalities of the main characters. In the end Good-bye Geist is nothing more than fodder for inspiration, an unfortunate case of a good idea that got left behind.