The Spring 2023 Manga Guide

Dark Gathering

What's It About? 

Keitarou Gentouga is a college freshman who hates ghosts. Unluckily for him, he has a knack for attracting spirits. Two years ago, this connection had led to him receiving a spiritual injury on his right hand, with his friend getting caught in the crossfire. The event caused him to become a shut-in, leaving him with very poor social skills. Fortunately, Keitarou is slowly starting to mingle with society, thanks to the help of his childhood friend, Eiko Houzuki.

As part of his rehabilitation, Keitarou takes on the part-time job of a private tutor, and his first pupil is none other than Eiko's cousin, Yayoi Houzuki. Besides being a child prodigy, there is another peculiarity regarding Yayoi—she has a spiritual constitution, just like Keitarou. However, in contrast to Keitarou, she yearns to encounter spirits, hoping to find the ghost that took her mother away. As Yayoi and Eiko drag along Keitarou to haunted spots, his part-time job seems to be straying further and further away from its original purpose.

Dark Gathering has story and art by Kenichi Kondō, with English translation by Christine Dashiell and lettering by Evan Waldinger. Viz Media will release the first volume on May 16.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

It's hard to deny that Dark Gathering is good horror. It utilizes both terror and horror to create a story that's visceral in two different ways, and that's even without the revulsion I felt every time Yayoi's eyes were facing forward. This book offers an impressive variety of horrible things for its protagonist, Keitaro, to endure - from hair creeping down throats to damned spirits and a gruesomely haunted phone booth.

That's where my issue with the book comes in. Keitaro is anything but a willing participant in this tale. Since he can see spirits from a young age, his ability resulted in harm coming to one of his friends, as well as being cursed himself. It reaches a point where, as a college student, he still has to go for weekly exorcisms at his grandmother's shrine. At this point, it's more like a disease than anything else. It makes perfect sense that he'd want to avoid all haunted locations. His childhood friend Eiko is fully aware of this – she's one of the people who convinced him to come out of his room after the elementary school incident – and yet she still sets him up to "tutor" her creepy cousin Yayoi and repeatedly drags him off to haunted places.

Yes, Eiko can't see spirits, but she's more than aware of what happened to Keitaro. Yet, she repeatedly throws him under the bus, triggering his trauma over and over again. Yayoi, at least, has the excuse of being in elementary school and having lost her parents in a terrible car wreck. But Eiko enables her to keep using Keitaro for her purposes, and the two of them emotionally blackmail him into going with them by reminding him that Yayoi is his responsibility. Only his grandmother is at all on his side, and it's frankly painful to watch him be taken advantage of.

I absolutely could be reading this with the wrong mindset, but I'm almost certain that Eiko and Yayoi's actions are meant to come across as funny and urgent rather than pigheadedly selfish. But the fact remains that all the well-done horrors in the world can't make me see this as anything but needlessly mean. Your mileage may vary.

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

So much of Dark Gathering clicked into place when I learned that Kenichi Kondō was an assistant on D.Gray-man. While Dark Gathering is a different breed of horror story, many of the same vibes are present. Like any good shonen horror, we have a precocious and creepy tyke and a young man who's dragged along for the ride, like Arthur praying to every deity that this is a "normal" field trip. The zany antics don't get in the way of genuine horror like Keitaro getting choked by a ghost with a telephone cable, or having a doll's haunted hair stuffed down his throat.

Thinking of the sight of Keitaro's uncovered hand still sends chills down my spine. While Eiko's antics are goofy, her cries of "Let's Go---ooost!" are amusing, and her peculiar double-pupil "skull" eyes are cute—it's hard not to love her. Her journey to recover her mother's soul is heartwarming amidst the gruesome going-on surrounding her. Is it a realistic goal? Maybe not. But then again, neither is the idea of trapping ghosts in plushies and turning her room into a bucket full of ghost crabs. No, not those kinds.

The story promises plenty of spooks, intrigues (especially with the final reveal concerning the other recipient of Keitaro's curse), and a very captivating goal. This is a fine showing for a shonen horror's first outing, and I'm definitely interested to know more. I strongly recommend it.

MrAJCosplay

Rating:

When I looked at the cover of this volume and saw a cute little girl with skulls in her eyes, I thought I was going to read a relatively light-hearted story with an edgy, dark aesthetic. I could not have been more wrong about the way that Dark Gathering handles its character portrayal as it's probably its biggest strength, straddling that line between making the characters likable while also making me genuinely afraid of what they are capable of. There is this air of mystery revolving around what everyone's intentions are when it comes to the supernatural, whether it's how far Yayoi will go to accomplish her goals, how Keitarou really feels about all the supernatural stuff that he attracts, and how Eiko seemingly allows all of this violent stuff to happen around her. The book does cheat a little bit with some of its narratives reveals by keeping some character names vague in some scenes when it really has no reason outside of deliberately withholding that information for the sake of a dramatic reveal later on. But aside from that, I was pleasantly surprised with the story's ability to hit me on multiple levels of engagement in a very organic way.