Blood on the Tracks vol. 1

True Story:  When I was looking over what I’d written and recorded for 2020, I noticed that I’d posted my review of “Gigant” twice in April.  That was embarrassing enough, but I couldn’t figure out what I had passed over in order for that to have happened.  Well, I finally solved that mystery.  Expect reviews of vols. 2 & 3 next week.

All of Shuzo Oshimi’s series that have been translated into English at this point have used a single concept as their starting point:  A strange girl leads an average boy down a path he was never expecting to go.  This setup worked best in “The Flowers of Evil,” and to lesser extent in “Happiness” and (so far) in “Inside Mari.”  However, the mangaka does deserve credit for finding significant deviations from that concept in the latter two series.  With “Blood on the Tracks,” Oshimi is giving us another take on this setup:  This time, the strange girl is a woman, and the mother of the main character.

Pointing that out may have set off some warning bells, so let me say this up front:  There’s no incest in this volume.  As for whether or not it’ll be part of the series at a later date… It would not surprise me based on what we see here.

That’s because the story revolves around average middle-schooler Seiichi Osabe and his mother Seiko.  To all outward appearances, she’s an average housewife married to an average salaryman.  To the reader watching her interactions with Seiichi, she comes off as overprotective, bordering on smothering.  You can see it in the way she looks at her son, hangs on his every word, and subtly controls his social life.  Nothing she does in the first 3/4th’s of the volume is out of the ordinary, however, it’s just that Oshimi colors her actions with a significant creep factor.

Even if you’ve never read another series from the mangaka, or skipped reading the description of this volume on the back cover (which includes the phrase “spiral into nightmare”) it’s hard to look at Seiko and not thing that something’s up.  Whether it’s her suspiciously calm face, or the way she looks when saying something like “You make me so happy” to her son, or the way she only freaks out when it looks like Seiichi is in trouble, it’s clear that something isn’t right with her.

It doesn’t stop there, though.  A visit from Seiko’s sister-in-law and her son early in the volume paints them with the same kind of sinister light — or rather, shadow on initial appearance.  The idea that something may not be right with the entire family started to hit me when they all gathered together for a nature hike towards the end of the volume.  As they were all out in the sunshine, I realized that they couldn’t be a secret clan of vampires?  Maybe they were aliens?  Or something more mundane like serial killers or cannibals?

While there’s nothing wrong with trying to build suspense over the course of an entire volume, Oshimi’s approach almost verges on becoming an outright parody.  The creep factor is sustained for so long without giving the reader any clues as to why things are so creepy that the tension starts to dissipate.  It stops reading like a slow-burn thriller and more like a Saturday Night Live skit.  Feel free to imagine Bill Hader at his most gonzo as Seiko in this case.

I like Oshimi’s manga and his drawn-out approach tried even my patience.  Worse yet is the fact that when we do get to the incident that’s going to drive the series going forward, it’s not hard to tell what’s going to happen before it happens.  I mean, the mangaka has kept us on edge and led us to expect the worst around every corner up to this point.  It’s not hard to see the setup and go, “Oh, I know what’s going to happen here,” because we’ve been led to believe that SOMETHING is going to happen and since we’re close to the end of the volume it’s probably going to happen now.

Essentially, this first volume of “Blood on the Tracks” reads like a first chapter or issue that has been expanded out to volume length.  The best version of a first chapter or issue will introduce the characters and their world, and then give us a little bit of story before revealing where it’ll actually be going by its end.  That’s exactly what Oshimi does here, except he does it over the course of over 200 pages instead of the 22-24 that most American comics have, or the 48 pages that made up the first chapter of this volume.  The end result feels grossly indulgent more than it does entertaining.

Longtime readers will remember that this isn’t the first series I’ve read from Oshimi to get started off on the wrong foot.  So I’m not about to give up on this series after just the first volume.  I’ll also admit that the mangaka’s slow-burn approach will likely be more interesting to take in next time now that the inciting incident has lit a fire under the narrative.  At least it happened within these 200 pages as opposed to not happening at all.