Gamurakan by Youji Fukuyama… uh. This is probably one of the strangest horror manga I’ve ever read. Or at the very least, it’s pretty far up there.

CONTENT WARNING: This manga has a bunch of gore but also it is like 70% nudity. Because, you know, why would weird little horrible marionette angel beings need clothes?

It has a pretty simple premise yet like if you were to ask me what happened in this manga, I’d be kind of hard pressed to actually explain it. I feel like there has to be something deeper to it, but honestly all I got from it was the feeling like I was reading a nightmare someone had.

Which, don't get me wrong, I'm all for.

Little tiny naked angel (???) beings roam around taking people over and cause fucking havoc just because they want to. That's literally the entire manga. There's really nothing more to it than that.

What’s truly bizarre about this manga is that I actually kind of like it. It strikes a very odd balance between strange dreamlike sequences and then just horrible gory schlock. There’s even like an afterword following the final chapter from a novelist going on and on about the true genius of Youji Fukuyama and essentially poo pooing younger people because they just don’t get it.

I mean no offense to Yasumi Tsuhara and I'm sorry as I'm about to go on a tangent here but... what?

Why exactly did this need a three page long afterword from not even the creator of the manga going on about his own personal interpretation of it? Couldn't just let the readers form their own interpretations of it? Apparently, my mental age is that of a baby, because I didn't draw even anywhere near as much information from this manga as he did.

To me, Gamurakan was just a fun weird horror manga about tiny people going around possessing people to fuck shit up just because it's fun.

Which is fine. Whatever the hell Yasumi Tsuhara interpreted it as is also fine. ~~To be honest, my eyes just kind of glazed over when I saw three pages of text wall.~~

But you know, don't fucking basically say in an afterword you're doing for someone else's manga

"IF YOU'RE NOT AN ADULT, YOU'RE NOT GOING TO UNDERSTAND THIS MASTERPIECE OF A HORROR MANGA. AND IF YOU ARE AN ADULT AND YOU DIDN'T GET IT, THEN YOUR MENTAL AGE IS THAT OF A BABY. GOO GOO GA GA. GO READ SOME SHITTY HORROR MANGA WHERE PEOPLE EXPLODE INTO BLOOD."

I'm exaggerating of course, but that's really what that afterword read like to me. It was completely unnecessary. Shorten it down to like one page about how the last chapter took like 10 years to actually come out, maybe include the bit about how he met Youji Fukuyama, and let that be it.

Anyways... I guess this is just why I generally just don't like things that leave a whole bunch of stuff open and left to interpret. Especially when it can also serve as a decent and fun idea if you just leave it alone and don't overthink it.

Like sure at the end of the manga I found myself going "well what the fuck was the point of any of this???" because that chapter that apparently took 10 years didn't really add anything. If anything, it just dropped the cliche horror ending of, "well it could just happen again!"

Because someone else has the weird Gamurakan game or whatever it is that they came from (???) in the first place on their computer. I think my biggest gripe with Gamurakan as a whole was that it should have never fully established that yeah that these little tiny ghost people who can come out of the screen actually do exist and are real.

There should have always been room to doubt whether they actually exist or not.

But, then if they don't actually exist, how do you explain when someone ends up getting stuck through a window?

I mean literally after that, the people around him are like expressing incredulity at his claims of an office girl was being possessed by tiny ghost people. But the logic of that doesn't make any fucking sense because how are you going to completely deny that without going "maybe I should believe the guy who is still walking around with a window stuck around him. How else am I capable of explaining that other than maybe I'm still in my bed dreaming that my supervisor fucking fell out of phase with reality?"

Other than that part, the whole chunk with the office was in fact my favorite part of the manga. Because the other characters (other than the cops) around the girl that is being possessed still have no fucking idea what is going on. A girl that they worked with started going fucking crazy and started trying to cut her hand off with a boxcutter after a cop handcuffed her to her desk.

Like that whole part was really good and really engaging. Because one of the cops proceeds to pull a gun because the last time he dealt with these things, he ended up getting dropped from the side of a building and onto a car paralyzing him. But the little Gamurakan's only reaction to seeing his gun was hey that looks pretty fucking cool, give me a turn with it.

There was also another whole sequence where there's like a reporter and she says the "Welcome to Gamurakan" phrase a whole bunch which causes them to infect her and also since she's being recorded, just straight up be able to come out of the TV. And that image of them like about to burst out of the TV caused me to fucking flashback when I saw a scene from David Cronenburg's Videodrome as a kid and it's of the TV like beginning to bulge and grow and it's just god no.

I can appreciate that this manga actually got that reaction out of me. I can appreciate the body horror, the gore, the weirdness and just general creepiness of the "Angels"... but if you asked me,

"but TGG what did you think of the plot? What is your personal interpretation of what this manga meant?"

My answer is nothing. For as I said earlier, my mental age is zero. I am a big baby who likes weird fucked up horror where people get possessed and are forced to throw themselves in front of an incoming truck and then the thing possessing them continues using their severed legs to continue moving around so they can find a new host that isn't in the process of dying.

Gamurakan is a 7 out of 10. Worth reading if you want to read something really strange and you don't dislike gore and don't mind copious amounts of nudity. But I probably would hesitate to recommend it to those that aren't already pretty far down the "horror hole"...