Mujina: Into the Deep vol. 4

Terumi is in the hospital, having been beaten within an inch of his life after trying to save Juno from the creeps who brought her into the city, took her rights card, and set her up for sex work.  Ubume is all ready to murder these guys for what they did, except her handler won’t allow it because that’d be bad for business.  So it’s a good thing that the editor of a tabloid magazine wants to see them dead – and his hands on the dirty showbiz info they have – which means that their days are numbered.  Which is what happens when a talented killer like Ubume is on their case, but who was she before she became a Mujina?  The answer to that lies in an island that was buried in the public record, where the rich went to indulge their every desire, and whose awful legacy looms large in this version of Japan.

Mangaka Inio Asano dropped a simple revenge setup at the end of vol. 3 and he wastes no time in paying it off at the start of this volume.  After some haggling, Ubume takes off for a club, schools a fellow Mujina, and then gives the bad guys exactly what they deserve in stylish fashion.  I’ve said before that this feels like Asano’s most commercially-minded series and the first third of this volume really plays into that.  Not in a bad way as the action is great, the bad guys are despicable enough, and there are even a few twists thrown in to keep things from being as straightforward as you’d expect.

What keeps this volume (and the series as a whole) from feeling like Asano has sold out is the bone-deep cynicism it demonstrates in the rest of the volume.  We learn a lot about the Not Epstein Island of the series and how it served not just as a playground for the rich, but as their breeding ground as well.  There’s also some info thrown around about how Mujina were not just created to allow for this, but how the effort to restore their human rights also plays into the ultra-rich agenda as well.  Basically, Asano is telling us that the whole system has been rigged from both sides and that we’re screwed in that regard.  Our only hope:  Sometimes the game will still crash even when the fix is in.  What keeps me reading is the hope that I’ll see that, as well as what’s going to happen to this cast of characters that has slowly endeared itself to me.