Housui Yamazaki
Postcards from Purgatory…
Private detective
Reiji Akiba has a theory about those weird coincidences we all encounter in
life. They are actually encounters with the dead – their way of sending us a
message. But you may not want to open such strange mail from beyond – not
unless you can see the ghostly attachment, like Akiba can. And not unless you
carry a tool that can kill what isn’t alive, like Akiba’s sanctified gun Kagutsuchi… digging a divine grave to lay to rest the
evil dead! (from the back of the book)
(Spoilers below)
Mail is a
horror manga about ghosts. It’s a short series (only three volumes long), which
makes it fairly easy to read the whole thing in one sitting.
The three volumes are made up of short stories with the
only recurring character being Akiba Reiji, a detective /medium/ghost hunter
who looks to be in his late 20s or early 30s. Akiba is really the only thing
remotely tying these stories together. Otherwise they’d just be unrelated ghost
stories.
There are six different stories in Volume 1, and none of
them are connected in any way aside from Akiba’s presence.
The first story, called Wine Cellar, opens at a photo shoot for a dirty magazine, where
some of the photographers find a skeleton near where they were working. When
one of the photographers, Harada, develops the pictures she notices something
in the background of one of them that looks like a headless child. Thinking
that she got a picture of a ghost, she calls up an occult specialist/detective,
Akiba. Akiba and Harada, along with one of her coworkers named Imai, all head
out to go look for the child’s missing head. Their search takes them to an
abandoned house, where Harada and Akiba locate the missing head in a wine
cellar… along with a great number of missing heads, and the body of the man who
took them. The man’s spirit attacks Harada. Akiba saves her by whipping out a
gun and shooting the spirit, sealing it in the bullet.
Hide and Seek
is the second story and starts off with a woman named Adachi Mari. Mari has
just moved into a new apartment and has decided to spend her day off cleaning it
up when a letter drops into her mailbox, sender unknown. The letter is from the
apartment’s former tenant, and details the strange happenings she experienced
while living there. Mari realizes that the exact same things are happening to
her, so she has no problem agreeing when the letter writer insists that the
apartment is haunted. It does help the letter writer’s case when the ghost of a
little girl emerges and drags Mari inside the apartment walls. Akiba then
bursts in to save the day, shooting the ghost and freeing Mari, still alive,
and the three previous tenants, all skeletons.
Story number three is Twins
and begins with a little girl named Tamami bandaged and laced-up in a straight
jacket in a hospital; with her mother and Akiba as visitors. According to
Tamami, she is being haunted and beaten up by her twin sister Tamamo, who’s
been dead for six months. Tamami’s mother thinks that the little girl is making
everything up. Akiba takes the case after coming across a picture Tamami drew
asking for help. Tamamo’s spirit appears at the hospital and Akiba shoots her.
The fourth story is Drive
and begins with Akiba putting to rest the spirit of a woman, before switching
over to a young woman named Michiyo driving home on the highway. Akiba contacts
her on her cell phone to tell her that the car she has just purchased, and is
currently driving, is haunted by the ghost of a child who died in the trunk. The
child’s spirit soon takes over the car, causing Michiyo to lose control of the
vehicle. Luckily Akiba arrives on a moped to stop the ghost and save Michiyo’s
life.
Story five is Ka-tsu-mi
and starts off with two teenage girls taking pictures of themselves in a park. One
of the girls, Yumi, is dead by the next day and the other girl, Yuko, is
frightened by this. She thinks that Yumi’s death has to do with a local urban
legend involving a ghost, so she contacts Akiba to see if he can help. Akiba
tells Yuko that the area where she and Yumi were taking pictures is built on a
site that used to house an old warehouse where a teenage girl named Katsumi
hung herself in 1938. He ends up telling her that Yumi’s death was because of
Katsumi and asks Yuko where they were taking pictures the night before. Yuko
doesn’t tell him but returns to the place that night and gets attacked by
Katsumi’s spirit. Akiba, who had followed her, arrives to save the day.
The last story in this volume, Visibility, is when we finally get some information about Akiba by
way of a flashback. It doesn’t say how long ago it happened, but it tells of
how he obtained his gun Kagutsuchi, that shoots special bullets to ‘kill’
ghosts, and became a detective/ghost hunter. Akiba grew up blind, but was able
to eventually regain his sight due to advances in medicine. It’s at the
hospital that he meets the previous owner of Kagutsuchi, who explains to him
about the ghosts still wandering on Earth. One such ghost follows Akiba home a
few days later and the strange man from the hospital comes to his rescue. The
man then gives Akiba Kagutsuchi.
Mail is my
favourite horror manga. It isn’t too gory, and it isn’t too confusing. It’s a
series of simple ghost stories all tied together by one unique premise.
As I said before, all six stories in this volume are
totally unrelated: they all star different characters, different ghosts, and
different settings (although they all take place in Japan, possibly Tokyo). The
only thing that ties these stories together in any way is Akiba himself, and
even the way he shows up differs from story to story. Sometimes he’ll be
contacted by that story’s main character, sometimes he’ll have been contacted
by someone else, and sometimes he’ll just show up having come across the
situation some other way.
Although he’s the only constant character throughout the
volume, we don’t really know much about Akiba. Even the last story Visibility, while being all about Akiba,
doesn’t really tell us much about him at all. The most we know about the man is
that he used to be blind and that he hunts ghosts for no other reason than the
fact that he can.
The spirit gun Kagutsuchi, which Akiba uses to shoot
spirits and trap them inside special bullets, isn’t really explained much
either and even then it isn’t explained at all until the last chapter. Nothing
is really explained in this volume. New characters are introduced in each story
and then promptly abandoned when their story is over. Most of these characters
are just one-dimensional with barely any defining characteristics; Akiba is
probably the one exception to this. The spirits are actually more interesting
than the humans. This isn’t a problem; I quite liked this arrangement.
The art style is realistic and very detailed. I
especially like the two-page cover spread for Hide and Seek, which almost makes my hands cramp just looking at
it. There is a nice variety of character designs, it’s without any exaggerations
or comically huge eyes or mouths (like what is common for a lot of manga
series). The realistic art style really works well with the creepy imagery,
making even simple things terrifying.
Now, this particular volume was wrapped in plastic when I
bought it, and that’s because of the nudity and gore. There isn’t really much
of either in this volume, but it is there. The first panel on the first page
has a naked woman on it, and then later on there’s another naked girl. I don’t
want to call this fan service since their nudity makes sense in context. I
usually refer to it as casual nudity. The gore is minimal as well; severed
heads and knife wounds that wouldn’t be so shocking if the art weren’t so
realistic. I wasn’t too bothered by it, though, since they didn’t get much
panel space.
Mail doesn’t
get its scares from gross-out factor, which I liked.
Mail Volume 1
is a great opener for the series. It doesn’t really explain anything until the
end, so just read the last chapter if that bothers you. The chapters don’t
really need to be read in any particular order since the individual stories
have nothing much to do with each other. The rest of the series could be just
more ghost stories, which certainly isn’t a problem, but one can’t help but
hope that we’ll learn more about Akiba in future installments. The art is
great, the stories are interesting, and the visuals go along with the narrative
to make everything just that much scarier.
I don’t recommend reading it alone with the lights off.
