Ajin: Demi-Human
a review by Grayphus
a review by Grayphus
The thing that impresses me the most is how completely underrated this manga is.
Maybe the anime adaptation didn't do that much in its favor, but oh well. It is what it is.
The amount of stunning art, intense character depth and stellar pacing are only some of the aspects that contribute to build the foundations of this manga, making it better than many mainstream stories of the same genre.
It's well structured to the point where I don't think I will ever read a (slightly cartoonish) military thriller as well constructed as this masterpiece.
I will preface this review by saying a couple of things that I feel are worth noting. The first one is that this manga is considerably graphic and for the sake of theming, I will be presenting some pictures. Nothing too heavy will be shown, but I feel like a disclaimer is in order. Secondly, there will be some minor spoilers for the plot as a whole, so be on the lookout for that. And lastly, this is my first review of any kind of story, so I'll try my best to keep it concise and cohesive. Hopefully I don't fail miserably.
But what makes this manga so great in my eyes? To answer that, I'll sum out some of the plot points that sold it for me. So, let's start from the beginning.
Well, kind of. It's just a showcase of the first few chapters in order to not spoil anything major.
Our protagonist is Kei Nagai, a seemingly normal student who is working hard to become a doctor in his adult life. However, his initial plans are disrupted when, as he is crossing the street, he is run over by a truck and dies.
"Whoa, what? The main character just dies in the first chapter?"
Well, yeah. Yes and no, really.
Because when he wakes up unharmed after a seemingly fatal car accident, he understands something very important, information that will alter the entire course of his life from that point on.
But to understand how that is possible and what all this means, I'm gonna have to go back a little bit.
Earlier in the chapter, some context is given to the reader, where we learn about a new and rare species. Ajin were first discovered as super soldiers in Africa, where they were labeled as "divine warriors". And no matter what happens to them in any sort of combat, they do not die.
The government tried to hide their existance, but something as important as the discovery of an immortal variant to humans could not be concealed from the public eye for long. Shortly thereafter, a brief period of generalized panic ensued, as the general public did not understand the causes or the consequences for this, be it evolution, a series of mutations or even the results of alien intervention.
Since they're highly dangerous beings because of their immortality, the government has put up rewards for people to capture and turn in Ajin in exchange for status and money. What happens after they're reported and captured is not widely known, but the reader gets a glimpse of what it consists of in the manga's very first page.
The general consensus is that, even if Ajin are human-like, they cannot be considered as humans and are not treated as such by society.
And the only way to distinguish them from humans is by death. After all, nobody should be able to do anything after they die. So, if a fatal event happens to someone and they can walk away afterwards, that only means one thing.
And maybe you can connect the dots and understand where I'm going with this one.
Kei Nagai is an Ajin.
After he wakes up from his death, Nagai fears that he will be reported to the authorities and used for government dissection and experimentation. To avoid that, he seeks refuge from society with the help of a friend, Kaito.
As he stumbles to evade any type of external human contact as to avoid the danger of getting caught, Nagai and Kaito run away with a motorcycle, as helicopters, police forces and even special organizations are on the run to find and capture him.
They come close to getting caught a couple of times by different people, but manage to escape due to Nagai's recently-discovered abilities of an Ajin. And through that, we get a glimpse as to what his special powers entail in actual life-threatening situations (well, at least for the humans involved).
Soon after that, we find out that there are a lot more Ajin (and a lot more to them as well) amidst mankind.
Hopefully I managed to catch your eye with this "free sample" of what the actual story has to offer.
Now for some personal commentary about the biggest strengths this work of art has, in my opinion. Just a second disclaimer, though: there will be a fair amount of SPOILERS from here on out, so I definitely do not recommend reading beyond this point if you have not read the manga in its entirety. So, consider this your spoiler warning.
Pretty much me retelling some plot points and how they add to this manga's quality overall.
It's incredibly fascinating to see Nagai and Satou's long game of chess from start to finish.
The first play is an especially notable move by Satou, by kidnapping Nagai's sister and immediately releasing her to a hospital after he inevitably shows up to their base to rescue her. After that, Satou apologises profusely to him and states that "it was the only way to get him to where they were". This is the start of Satou's double-cross.
After observing his behavior, he decides that Nagai is still holding on to his humanity with too strong of a grip, so Satou turns him in to the authorities to make him experience the government experimentation firsthand. He does that by pretending that their base was found out and using his IBM as a sniper to knock Kei out with a tranquilizer shot. After he was captured and severely tortured by the government laboratory, that created a pretense for Satou to "rescue" Nagai and reinforce the concept that humanity will only destroy the Ajin. But that did not go as planned.
Eventually, their morals diverge while they're escaping and Nagai kills Satou on instinct. This causes Satou to show his true colors in a demonstration of just how much of a psychopathic terrorist he is. From then on, the protagonist/antagonist relationship is finally forged.
The duality between Nagai's team (led by him, a sociopath) and Satou's team (led by him, a psychopath) plays in turns, which is all the more fitting with Satou's way of thinking about his revolution plan. Nagai's plan is to prevent Satou from dominating Japan's government through terrorist bombings and consequently causing a huge amount of casualties.
Satou's plan is...
What is Satou's plan? I mean, his "plan" is to bring the downfall of the current status quo in order to favor his own idea of a government. But what does that entail for him? What does he gain from it?
It's shown time and time again that he gets personal enjoyment out of fighting and killing humans, sure. But in his mind, doing that is a game just like any other. There's even some comparisons between games like baseball or even retro games like Pac-Man. But you can only play the same game for so long before it starts to get boring.
And that happens a few times in the story, when he completely changes his course of action throughout the waves of his plan in order to seek his twisted idea of "excitement". It fits inside what the character is supposed to be and it happens on the right moments to induce suspense to the reader.
It all climaxes when he gets bored of the entire plan altogether and decides to emigrate to the rest of the world and figure out some new games to play. However, Nagai finally reaches him right before he is able to do that, and their final confrontation in this moment is the chess game's checkmate.
Hopefully this wasn't too convoluted thus far. Time to wrap it up, then!
Overall, Satou is an incredibly well written villain. Everything he does is so erratic in a shockingly cohesive way that you just can't predict what will happen at any given point. Every one of his individual moves in combat is impulsive and out of a wish to fight against the odds and beat the disadvantage (even if he created the disadvantage himself in the first place). It's the perfect cartoonish psychopath to go against our slightly sociopathic protagonist.
Nagai serves as the perfect counterpoint. He does not particularly care for humanity as a whole, but even though his lack of emotional investment on others is frequently mentioned as one of the centers of his train of thought, that is often overshadowed by the strength of his personal values. So much so that even after the conclusion of the main plot, Nagai (now under a special witness protection program provided by the government he helped defend) still wishes to get back into his education and become a doctor in order to save people.
They're a perfect fit for the metaphor of two sides of the same coin, and it works very well to build some massive suspense in the story's progression.
It's also worth noting that the side characters are so deeply explored that they all feel like they could be protagonists of their own spin-offs, it's that good. The only reason I won't go in-depth into them one by one is that this review would become unfathomably big if I did. So this remark is in honor of everyone that stood on the sidelines to help Nagai or even Satou in their respective plans.
Overall, this manga is absolutely fantastic and suceeded to overcome any expectations that I had going in.
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