The Fall 2019 Manga Guide

The Drifting Classroom

What's It About? 

Sho is your average kid. He wants the new, expensive toy in the store window, he likes to play, and he often gets into fierce his arguments with his mother. On the day before school, one such argument occurs, and becomes a great tragedy. Because when Sho gets to school, he and his entire class, all the teachers and all the students and all the buildings, are teleported elsewhere, where alien dunes roll on the horizon and nothing is recognizable. And so a nightmare begins. Hysteria breaks out, the adults lash out and violence begins in earnest. Sho must now grow up fast, and unite all the members of his class as one, in order to survive and fight the vicious whims of people in fear, people exhibiting their worst selves, in order to survive and find out where they are, and hopefully, get back to his mother and apologize.

The Drifitng Classroom is a horror manga by Kazuo Umezz, originally published in 1972. This perfect edition is a release by Viz Media with a new translation. It retails for $34.99 physically and $15.99 digitally.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

If the classroom had never drifted, the girls would never have been trapped in their school in School-Live! and the middle school students would never have been stranded on that island in Cage of Eden. Those are just two of the series that seem to owe a lot to Kazuo Umezz's 1972-74 horror series, but there are many more if you think about individual elements of the story, and the art definitely appears to have been an influence on modern horror mangaka such as Junji Ito. Still, not every influential piece can stand the test of time on its own merits, so it's nice to see that The Drifting Classroom remains able to.

The story, about an elementary school that “drifts” free of its own time period and into a grim future, reads a little like a Cold War fever dream. The initial assumption when the school disappears is that it has been the victim of a nuclear explosion, and those fears are shared by the students and teachers in the school when they see the sandy, blasted wasteland beyond the school gates. The lack of water or plant life for most of the book continues along this line, and you can see that as the adults begin to lose their grips on reality a piece of them thinks that perhaps they've been jettisoned back to the bad old days of a war that at the time of publication wasn't quite thirty years gone. Interestingly enough, this isn't the only social fear that Umezz brings to the fore in the roughly four volumes collected in this first of three omnibus editions. One of the most striking for modern readers is likely to be the fears of feminism uprooting “traditional values,” so to speak, when the children realize that they're going to have form some sort of government in order to keep them all on the same basic page. A girl calling herself Princess challenges series protagonist Sho in the prime ministerial election, and the smartest kid in the school quickly says that she shouldn't be allowed to rule, because the psychology texts he's been reading say that women are too emotional and only fit for bearing and raising children. Given that in a series written today we'd likely hold Princess up as more of a strong character and show her ability to beat up the boys as a positive (and would probably cut out some of the crotch-stomping), the unambiguous portrayal of her as a villain and an unfit ruler, a woman who doesn't know her place and thus becomes a tyrant, is unsettling. It's very true to the Japan of 1972, but reading it in 2019 is difficult.

Social issues aside, part of what makes this so successful as a horror story is the fact that we almost never see anything awful happen on the page. There's a lot more power in the kind of implication that Umezz is able to use in his art, and that leaves the truth up to our own twisted imaginations. Since that's the very power that allows the kids to survive where the adults cannot, it's effective on at least two levels, and horror fans shouldn't miss this hardcover edition of a story whose influence can't be escaped.

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Faye Hopper

Rating:

I was not expecting The Drifting Classroom to be as brutal as it is. I knew it by name, of course, and I knew Kazuo Umezu was a huge influence on so many mangaka, including the likes of Junji Ito, but I didn't know shocking it still was, how much power still lay in its pages after all this time. Between Sekiya, the disgruntled cafeteria cook, committing unspeakable acts of violence against children or the constant despair and anguish that laces every page, this is a manga that is not to be trifled with. This a manga that is not for everyone, and even for those who are compelled by it will probably include more than a few instances of wincing or gasping.

But it is stunning and breathless to this very day. The pacing is exquisite. There is not a single moment to breath, of respite, only a frenzied struggle to stay alive. As such, this re-release, though seven hundred-some pages, goes down quickly, with me finishing in under two hours and immediately wanting more. The artistry Umezu displays is absolutely incredible. From his immaculate use of two-page spreads to convey all-consuming, alien scale and horror, to his careful choices of when to use hyper-detail and when to utilize simpler abstraction (like the contrast between the prevailing cartoon-y style and the moment where Shinichi, horrified, sees that his school has been teleported to another place, another time), Umezu is a storyteller entirely in control of his craft and his tone. It is a powerful, gripping series. And one that I did expect to like.

Because I'm not a fan of the kind of story The Drifting Classroom is. Stories about survivalism, stories about the worst of human nature, latent inside all of us, being brought out due to social experiment-like circumstances. It very often feels contrived and dishonest. People are fragile, emotional, volatile, and will more often than not react poorly during extreme hardship, and making a specialized set of circumstances just to bring out these base instincts often feels forced. It's certainly no great insight. And there are parts of The Drifting Classroom I don't like: The treatment of women, though better than a lot of manga I've read from this era, is still not great, and the story often feels like it's being written in real time, leading to character backtracking and awkward scripting. But The Drifting Classroom, before everything else, is a story about being a child in a world gone mad. A world where the adults, the existing power structures, have failed you due to their own shortsightedness and closedmindedness. And that it's up to you, one of the young ones, to right wrongs, cling to your better impulses and fix the world. This is the root of The Drifting Classroom's immortality. Because here, now, and in every time, the adults have let us down. The adults have been leading us astray. The world is on fire, and it is all their fault, and they will not help us fix it. Gather your wits and the few friends you have, and try to stay alive and fix it. This is the struggle at the root of The Drifting Classroom, and it is just as resonant a struggle in 2019 as it was in 1972.