When the bullied are put in a position of power, will they succumb to it?
Creative Staff
Story/Art: Keiko Suenobu
Translation/Adaptation:
What They Say
Mizuki Konno is your typical high school junior at Yanno Prefectural High School. Like many teens her age, she is studying hard for college and when she has some downtime she likes to fuss over fashion and make-up. While she may not be one of the class elites, Mizuki is fortunate to be on the right side of her class’s idols. But that might not settle well with those who are in a similar academic status but not so lucky with their social lives.
Mizuki has determined in her diary who is a “have” and who is a “have not.” The diary is discovered before a class fieldtrip and tensions are now at new heights. Fights may soon break out – and ironically they will come from those “meek and helpless” figures who supposedly have no friends or future. But all this is supplanted when tragedy strikes in the form of a traffic accident and the class is split into two new groups: the living and the dead!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
While a good number of manga come across my desk that end up getting shipped to other reviewers, sometimes a work comes across that just begs to be sampled and sometimes devoured. Limit, from Keiko Suenbo, was certainly one of those titles. The mangaka isn’t too well known in the English speaking world as she only has a pair of works to her name, Vitamin that was released in 2001 and Life from 2002 which also got a TOKYOPOP release in 2006. I had taken in a few volumes of that as released and really liked her style, skew and approach to writing and drawing. With that series having run twenty volumes and coming to completion in 2009, Suenbo didn’t wait long before starting up Limit and going in a different if familiar direction.
The series revolves around Konno, a high school girl with an interesting if unsurprising view of life. We see her at the start of the book where she’s simply walking to school but has a very disconnected view of life. Seeing someone passed out on the sidewalk, presumably from a night of drinking if not outright dead, she just walks by but wonders what’s going on. She’s no different than the majority of adults there either as they look on in the same way or with disgust or even shame. The only one that gets involved is another student from her school that she sort of knows, Kamiya. She’s a quiet student and one that sticks up in a small way for those being picked on while trying to not draw too much attention to herself.
For Konno, we see that her life in school is one that isn’t too much of a surprise. With the very popular Sakura being the queen of the school, Konno is one of those that hangs on to her side to help her keep that disconnect. She’s close to the right people, says the right things but stays at enough distance so as to not be drawn into things. She’s paired with Haru as well who is closer to Sakura but in the end they’re really just the basic popular trio with different aspects. What provides the counterweight to the book is Morishige, a dark looking classmate who is pretty much the joke of the class. She’s dead last for everything, gets all the awful assignments and is even forced to be the one to draw in the lot for where they get to go for a school trip since if it’s bad, they can blame her. If it’s good, they just ignore her.
The trip this time is one that all the classes go to, a retreat in the mountains, but she ends up picking the last one which is the worst one as the final class has to do all the cleanup. It seems like a trip from hell for most everyone and Morishige is getting the blame. Where it all goes off the rails though is when on the trip up on the bus to the mountains, the driver falls asleep and the whole thing goes over the edge. Death abounds and only a few people survive, such as Konno, Kamiya, Haru, Morishige and another girl named Chikage. It’s a disturbing scene overall as Konno awakens in the overturned bus with bodies and parts all around her. Staggering out, taking stock and finding others over the duration only leads to more of a shell shocked experience though since it’s turned into a bit of a Lord of the Flies experience.
This is where the book really kicks off though as we see that Morishige has found a position of power within this setting due to coming across a scythe and working with Chikage to gain more food. Combined with her tarot deck that she can use to intimidate others, Konno’s in shock over the various deaths, such as Sakura’s, and can’t believe what’s happening. With it being in the mountains and not exactly a regular schedule, chances of being found quickly are small. Even worse, scared as they are, Morishige sets the tone of control well as a sense of revenge comes her way and she nudges the situation to her advantage. It’s hard to believe that these kids may go this route instead of working a way to the road and trying to get somewhere, but with the state they’re in and the clingy nature of the girls that want to have an authority figure to guide them, it does make some amount of sense.
Suenobu works the characters well here as we get flashes of their past and a real look at Konno in particular to understand why she’s as disconnected as she has been. Seeing the others vary in how they submit to Morishige is also really fascinating to watch since it goes to their own pasts as well as how Morishige is trying to gain the upper hand after being at the lowest end of the scale for most of her life it seems. She relishes it and you can almost see her being an ideal person to start a cult and really cause some serious trouble if she can get it going. The characters are the real draw here and the way they operate in the woods and mountainside, gathering some food and coming up with a structure to survive until they’re found. It has some brutal moments, but you can see how Morishige is intent on really taking advantage of things here to deal with all the slights, insults and abuse she’s sustained and just getting what she feels she deserves to do to others.
In Summary
As the back cover suggests, it’s very easy to see shades of Heathers and Lord of the Flies here in how social structure is upturned and its origins and present use of the school class structure. While Konno is the lead character and we see a lot of it through her internal monologue, it really ends up being more about Morishige as it progresses since she’s the dominant force and the one in control, at least for now. The whole situation is certainly a disturbing one to see unfold and the various components aren’t pleasant when you get down to it. Suenobu drives it home with good, intense character artwork, murky and spooky settings once in the darkened woods and she conveys some real horror with the bus incident itself but also with the bullying that goes on at school and longer after everything goes to hell. I’m really curious where Suenobu intends to go with this since part of what she’s doing can’t be sustained but it could lead to some other really interesting material.
Content Grade: B+
Art Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Vertical
Release Date: October 9th, 2012
MSRP: $10.95
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