By Jiro Matsumoto (Vertical)
ISBN: 978-1-935654-30-8
Civilisation has radically changed. What we knew is no longer right or true, but disturbing remnants remain to baffle and terrify, as High School girl Velveteen and her decidedly off-key classmate and companion/enemy Mandala eke out an extreme existence on the banks of a river in post-Zombie-Apocalypse Tokyo.
Here, using an abandoned tank as their crash-pad, the girls while away the days and nights slaughtering roaming hordes of zombies – at least whenever they stop squabbling with each other.
From the very outset of this grim, sexy, gratuitous splatter-punk horror-show there is something decidedly “off†going on: a gory mystery beyond the usual “how did the world end this time?â€
On the surface, Velveteen and Mandala (Becchin To Mandara in its original release in the periodical Manga Erotics f, between 2007-2009) is a Buffy-style monster-killing yarn beginning at ‘The Riverside’ with the pair awaking from dreams to realise and remember the hell they now inhabit whilst ‘Smoke on the Riverside’ reveals a few of the nastier ground-rules of their new lives and especially Velveteen’s propensity for arson and appetite for destruction…
‘Sukiyaki’ finds the girls on edge as food becomes an issue whilst the introduction of ‘The Super’ who monitors their rate of zombie dispatch leads to more information (but not necessarily any answers) in this enigmatic world, whilst ‘The Cellar’ amps up the uncertainty when Velveteen steals into her new boss’s ghastly man-cave inner sanctum.
In a medium where extreme violence is commonplace, Matsumoto increasingly uses unglamorised nudity and brusque vulgarity to unsettle and shock the reader but the flashback events of … ‘School Arcade, Underground Shelter’ – if true and not hallucination – indicate that this society this debased might not be worth saving from the undead…
In ‘Omen’ and ‘Good Omen (Whisper)’ the mysteries begins to unravel as B52 bombers dumps thousands more corpses by the Riverside, adding to the “to do†roster of the walking dead that the girls must deal with once darkness falls…
Throughout the story Matsumoto liberally injects cool artefacts of fashion, genre and pop-culture seemingly at random, but as the oppressive horrors get ever closer to ending our heroines in ‘Genocide’ and ‘Deep in the Dark’, a certain sense can be imagined, so that when the Super is removed and Velveteen is promoted to his position in ‘Parting’ the drama spirals into a hallucinogenic but perhaps utterly untrustworthy climax in ‘Mandala’s Big Farewell Party’ and ‘Nirvana’ before the revelations of ‘Flight’…
Deliberately obfuscatory and strictly aimed at over 18s, this dark, nasty and scatologically excessive tale graphically celebrates the differences between grotesque, flesh-eating dead-things and the constantly biologically mis-functioning still-living (although the zombie “Deadizens†are still capable of cognition, speech and rape…), all wrapped up in the culturally acceptable and traditional manner of one blowing the stuffings out of the other…
Young Jiro Matsumoto is probably best known in Japan for the dystopian speculative sci-fi revenge thriller Freesia, but here his controversial yet sublime narrative gifts are turned to a much more psychologically complex – and almost meta-fictional – layering of meaning upon revelation upon contention that indicates that if you have a strong enough stomach the very best is still to come…
© 2009 Jiro Matsumoto. All right reserved. Translation © 2011 Vertical, Inc.