Blood on the Tracks vol. 14

I don’t want to compare my interest in this series to the grip that Seiichi’s mom has on him, but it’s really starting to feel similar.  Even ten years on, our protagonist still can’t take control of his own life without facing the specter of his mother.  As for me, while I can’t quite say this is a genuinely good series that I’m reading because I’m genuinely interested in and enjoying it, this title still keeps doing things in a way that has me curious to know what’s going to happen next.  Which is exactly what happens here.

Credit where credit is due, I appreciated the intentional anti-climax which starts off this volume.  Vol. 13 left off with Seiichi encountering Fukiishi at a cemetery and I was sure that they were going to find some way to reconnect.  Even the text on the back of the volume indicated as much.  That it doesn’t happen leaves you wondering where things are going to go from there.

Or maybe not so much if you noticed the warning about references to suicide beneath the table of contents of this volume.  Though the scene is handled with a level of matter-of-factness that’s unsettling, there’s a lack of drama to it.  Which mainly comes from the fact that the reader will note that there’s around a hundred pages left in the volume when this scene comes up.  What saves it, dramatically and artistically, is the moment when Seiichi realizes that he can’t go through with it.  I won’t spoil what happens here, but it’s very well-rendered for something so expected.

So what does make up the last hundred or so pages of this volume?  Something that I thought was going to happen much later than it does here.  Seiichi’s reaction to it is about what you’d expect, but also one of the high points of the volume.  Mangaka Shuzo Oshimi gives the moment of realization a surreal, phantasmagorical feel to it as the main character’s sense of self and the world around him essentially disintegrate at this news.  It’s news that he doesn’t want to face at all, except that he does because he only knows to go along with the flow of this world.

That mindset makes for some very uncomfortable scenes as he meets with the police to resolve the situation which has come up.  You could almost call these scenes “darkly comic” in that the officers seem single minded in their determination to not acknowledge how uncomfortable Seiichi is about things.  That would assume there’s something funny about all of this, which there isn’t.

What follows is Seiichi doing his best to barely cope with the situation that’s been thrust upon him and the damage it continues to do to his mental state.  Oshimi conveys it well, even though one has to wonder just how much stress he’s going to be able to take before he, or the narrative, snaps.  However, there was one thing I did like about all this, and that’s how our protagonist may be holding onto a delusion about how one character looks in the present day.  It’s been ten years, but they don’t look to have aged a day.  It’s implied that they have changed, but Seiichi is stuck on how they looked then in his mind’s eye.

I want to see how he deals with that.  As well as what has happened to this character in the past ten years as they have clearly not been kind at all.  There’s a story to be told there and I’d like to know what it is.  It may be depressing, yet it doesn’t feel like an obvious tale to be told.  So even though “Blood on the Tracks” hasn’t made me fully enjoy it with this volume, I still find myself curious against my better instincts to keep following it to see where it’s going.