The Fall 2020 Manga Guide

Mieruko-chan

What's It About? 

One day, Miko suddenly started seeing grotesque beings that others couldn't. Her response was not to run, not to face them, but to do everything she could to completely ignore them! Can she keep a straight face and continue her day-to-day life while surrounded by horrifying monsters?

Mieruko-chan is illustrated and scripted by Tomoki Izumi. Yen Press will release both printed and digital versions of the manga's first volume on November 17 for $13.99 and $6.99 respectively.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Mieruko-chan is the sort of book that starts out with one gag and then the creator gets into it and it becomes a much different story. It opens as a pun on “Miko,” the heroine's name, and the verb “mieru,” which means “to see” but carries the implication of seeing things that are supposed to be invisible. So Miko-chan is an otherwise ordinary high school girl who can see the creepy ghouls that are always around but invisible to most people, like her friend Hana. Especially her friend Hana. That's basically it for the first third of the volume.

Things take a turn when Hana and Miko go to Mrs. Donut (an unsubtle reference to doughnut chain Mr. Donut) and it suddenly starts to look like the things Miko has been seeing are less random icky monsters and more like angry or unhappy ghosts. For example, when Miko gets into the wrong line at the doughnut place, she ends up in a queue of bloody ghosts waiting to be…consumed…by a black portal in the wall. When Hana scolds her for staring at her phone while walking, she does it with the line in the background, making it look awfully like the wall portal might be for the ghosts of irresponsible cellphone users who died as a result of their carelessness. Later on that same trip, Miko sees the ghoul of a hanged man who keeps trying to play rock-paper-scissors (did he lose?), and when the girls try to find a home for a stray kitten, Miko makes Hana refuse the nice-looking guy surrounded by evil cat-like spirits and insists on the Yakuza-looking guy who has two nekomata on his shoulders. (Nekomata are the spirits of old domestic cats; the implication we see later is that they were the man's previous cats who didn't want to leave him.)

That leads into the most interesting chapter in the book, the final one, which lets us know that Miko can in fact see plain old friendly ghosts. It's definitely a little sad, but it takes the story in a direction that's more sustainable going forward, because a series that hinges entirely on Miko seeing gross spirits latching onto the unsuspecting Hana could get old very quickly. It does, however, feel pretty disconnected from the beginning of the book, so it will be interesting to see where things go in volume two. Since it does have interesting art (and mild fanservice if you're looking for that) and an evolving mythology, I think it will be worth giving it that second volume to even itself out.

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Caitlin Moore

Rating:

The first thing that stood out to me about Mieruko-chan, a gag manga about a high school girl who can see ghosts, wasn't the humor. It also wasn't the intentional mish-mash of styles between the living characters and the spirits that haunt her. It was how inappropriately horny it was. Like the protagonist Miko, I am haunted by random, subtle out-of-place fanservice shots in anime and manga that other people don't seem to notice. Like, why are her pajamas see-through in some shots? Like her, I try to ignore them and hope they'll go away, but they never do.

If the manga were funny, I'd be willing to forgive it, but it's not; at least, not enough for me to not be distracted from the gaze-y camera angles or the fact that Hana, her boobalicious friend, does things like take off her underwear in the locker room without realizing it, and then walks around commando in a miniskirt. And it's probably causation, not just correlation that the best chapters are the ones that don't constantly find excuses for shots of Miko's thighs.

It's a solid concept: one day, Miko started seeing horrifying ghosts that try to engage with her, catch her attention, and talk with her. She tries her best to ignore them, like you would the person on the bus muttering ethnic slurs or men shouting obscenities at you on the street, but it's hard and upsetting. Actually, now that I've typed that, that could be a really powerful metaphor in the right hands! Tragically, it is not, and instead it's a horror-comedy half the time and cheesecake comedy the other.

Credit to Izumi Tomoki, though – the ghosts are pretty horrific. They're hollow-eyed and drippy and grotesque, and Miko's body language and facial expressions as she attempts to ignore them are well-done. There's some real creativity in their designs! The last chapter of the volume is touching in a way that's perhaps not super original, but I didn't see it coming regardless.

I'm having a hard time not thinking of the manga this could have been with a different author – one where the horrors Miko encounters are metaphors for the intrusions a teenage girl faces, instead of the paneling intruding on her itself. Maybe that story is out there?