Asadora! vol. 5

Vol. 4 ended with Asa flying off with researcher Keiichi to confront the monster as it prepares to make landfall in Enoshima.  You’d think that would be enough action to base an entire volume’s story around, but mangaka Naoki Urasawa has other plans.  As Asa tries to improvise a solution to the crisis at hand, her friends and family have their own issues to deal with.  Miyako is being menaced by thugs.  Kasuga is dealing with the police after the hit-and-run incident in the previous volume.  Yone is either preparing to make her showbiz debut, or about to be taken advantage of at the hands of a skeevy producer.  Then there’s Kinuyo and Asa’s siblings who are wondering where the girl could be on a rainy night like this.

It may sound like Urasawa is trying to cram too much into one volume with all of the different plot threads and characters he’s juggling here.  The incredible thing is that it never feels that way as the mangaka skillfully leaps between each of them to keep the momentum rolling throughout.  You’d also worry that the story, particularly Asa and Keiichi’s encounter with the monster, would feel choppy and disjointed with all this jumping around.  That doesn’t happen either as Urasawa manages the incredibly tricky business of making sure the reader gets a decent amount of story where something important happens each time he changes perspective.  It really does feel like he’s just delivering the “good parts” of each thread with every jump.

Though I’ve liked this series from the start, vol. 5 is the first one where it feels like it’s living up to the standards set by “Monster” and “20th Century Boys.”  After “Mujirushi,” “Sneeze,” and the slow-ish start to this series, I was starting to worry that Urasawa had lost his touch.  Vol. 5 shows that’s not the case and I’m hoping that he can keep the energy level up as things start getting back to normal at the end.  Or he could just give us more of the female wrestlers who debut here, I’d be fine with that too.