Adabana vol. 1

The severed hand of high school student Mako Igarashi is discovered when it is mailed to her home.  Before the rest of her body can be found, one of her classmates, Mizuki Aikawa, confesses to her murder.  She tells the police where to find Mako’s body, and severed head, as well as where another person she killed, Mako’s creepy uncle, can be found.  This seems like a couple of open-and-shut cases, but Mizuki’s court-appointed attorney Yutaka Tsuji isn’t so sure.  There are things about his client’s story that just don’t add up the more he digs into it, and there’s no indication whether this will lead to Mako’s exoneration, or something far more sinister.

“Adabana” by NON is an outlier in terms of what manga tends to get published over here.  It’s a mature, serious, legal thriller set in the present day and doesn’t give the impression it’ll have any kind of fantasy or sci-fi elements.  Even though some of its mature bits can come off as somewhat salacious – because that full-body shot early on of Mizuki’a naked backside in the shower was absolutely necessary to the story – publishing this kind of thing would seem to be commercial suicide.  So it’s a good thing that it’s only a three-volume series, which means that Dark Horse is going to publish all of it (with the remaining two volumes having already been solicited).

Based on this first volume, that’s a genuinely good thing.  “Adabana” doesn’t break any new ground in terms of its storytelling, but it feels like a solid execution of familiar storytelling devices so far.  It’s easy to assume that Mizuki is being set up as an unreliable narrator and while Yutaka is presented as something of a well-meaning stooge initially, he shows that he’s actually good at his job the further we go.  Particularly when it comes to questioning Mako’s “stalker” in the story.  It could all fall apart, but this first volume has me intrigued in seeing where everything goes, and how the story is going to unravel, in the next two volumes.