When most anime-only fans think of Muneyuki Kaneshiro, the first thing that comes to mind is the psychological warfare in the mangaka’s hyper-competitive soccer series, Blue Lock. What fans might not know is that before he wrote the mega-popular manga series-turned-anime, he penned a supernatural series called Jagaaan back in 2017.
After it concluded in 2021 under Shogakukan’s weekly Big Comic Spirits magazine, publisher Kana Manga is finally localizing the series in English. After reading an early review copy ahead of its release, Jagaaan is easily more messed up than Blue Lock, thanks in huge part to how it takes a familiar sci-fi premise and asks how it could be even more horrific in the most can’t-look-away fashion possible.
Jagaaan might be the best example of a writer and illustrator matching each other’s freak since, well, Kaneshiro and Prison School mangaka Akira Hiramoto collabbed on Super Ball Girls (IYKYK). Written by Kaneshiro and illustrated by dark fantasy illustrator Kensuke Nishida (I Am a Hero in Nagasaki), the series follows a pitiful loser named Shintaro Jagasaki. For the most part, Jagasaki leads a pretty bog-standard life with very little to complain about. He lives with his girlfriend, who’s ready to tie the knot; he has job security as a local police officer in a quiet neighborhood where not much happens; and his extroverted personality makes him the life of most parties. His nice-guy persona is a corrosive façade for a man one bad day away from crashing out.
Turns out, he couldn’t be more irritated by how cookie-cutter his life is. Behind his forced smile is a man who fantasizes about blowing everything away with the point of his fingers. He’s a powder keg of a human being begging for an excuse to explode. It doesn’t take long for Jagasaki to stumble upon an excuse to break bad.
One day, humanity is attacked by a mysterious species that can corrupt the bodies of everyday people. After worming their way underneath folks’ skin, the frog-shaped critters transform people into grotesque monsters. Poetically, said monsters reflect whatever inner turmoil and frustration that attracted the frog guys to them in the first place. That’s something only the reader can appreciate, because everyone near one of these monsters is too busy getting shish-kebabed or flattened into hamburger meat to pontificate on why it had to happen.
To make matters even weirder (because why not at this point), a giant talking owl tells Jagasaki it’s his duty to kill every monster he comes across, using his newfound monster ability to transform his arm into a fleshy gun. In what I can only describe as the most “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” plot progression I’ve ever read in a series, Jagasaki agrees. Not because he’s fighting to save the day for humanity, but because he kinda gets off on the high of blowing things up.
What made the first volume of Jagaaan such an entertaining read is how abrasive and cartoonish its story is. For starters, while I was thumbing through the manga, I had the niggling thought that Jagaaan was giving Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte by way of Kamen Rider‘s monster-of-the-week formula. Imagine my surprise when they made explicit references to the two series as if to say, “No shit.” Jagaaan is pretty much a fucked up Reese’s peanut butter cup of Kamen Rider and Parasyte, and it knows it. Chief among the ways it pulls off such a specific concoction is its artwork. The way Nishida contorts the already caricatured faces of folks in Jagaaan into grimaces and macabre oddities is nightmarish stuff. Likewise, the way Kaneshiro stirs up a narrative that taps into the social anxiety of a neighbor going off the deep end is as unnerving to read as it is darkly funny to watch play out. It also doesn’t hurt that Jagasaki is already a truly unhinged protagonist, treating what would otherwise be a doomsday scenario as a new lease on life.
Jagasaki’s violent, impulsive thoughts and his burgeoning psychosexual urges might as well be a line of dominoes Kaneshiro and Nishida giggle-knock over. It’s a twisted, horny, and dark manga that’s hard to put down once you see its poetry in motion with each jarring page turn. From what the manga offers in its first volume, Jagasaki’s adventures feel poised to be Crank-level unhinged mania, with progressively grotesque-yet-cool monsters for him to hunt and a provocative premise that makes you wonder how far its two creators can take Jagasaki down the rabbit hole.
Jagaaan is available for pre-order now and releases on September 29.
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