This review is gonna be very nonlinear and it is almost a stream of consciousness work so que sera sera.

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power, which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all– what then would life be but despair?”

“If such were the case, if there were no sacred bond which united mankind, if one generation arose after another like the leafage in the forest, if the one generation replaced the other like the song of birds in the forest, if the human race passed through the world as the ship goes through the sea, like the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless activity, if an eternal oblivion were always lurking hungrily for its prey and there was no power strong enough to wrest it from its maw—how empty then and comfortless life would be!”

“But therefore it is not thus…”

It is a blessing to be given life, but to live is almost a wanton occurrence. You live long enough, you’ve seen enough. The commonplace news is filled with the commonplace views– the political rot, the societal wickedness, the wars of multiplex beliefs, the hushed lamentations of unfortunate billions of souls spread across a planet called Earth. The average human being walks around 216,262,500 steps in a lifetime. In one of those million steps– have you ever wondered if you met God?

The World is Mine starts with a bang. In one place, a monster stirs within the belly of the deep ocean. In another place, two ruffians drive a car full of homemade bombs, with lowly intentions of carving a path of murderous destruction. Mon, a savage and rapacious brute, relishes his own primitive fancies and desires, obeying none but his own whims of power. His accomplice, Toshi, on the other hand, is a meek but decisive man, capable of realizing his own explosive dreams only via his symbiosis to Mon. Mon is in Toshi’s words the hero who does what he wants, and this slanted relationship, that makes Toshi the poet who can only sing praises about Mon’s victories and accomplishments, elevating the demon while he himself sinks unto hell.

Because that’s how their meeting started in the beginning: “when the sign appears in the sky, you will encounter great power”. Or rather, you could say that’s how the three of them crossed paths– for in this formula of life and death, nature has a will of its own. You could say it takes the form of Higumedon, a mysterious bear-like beast, whose cataclysms are synchronized with the machinations of our two serial killers. Wherever the two commence their slaughter, Higumedon’s gruesome trail of blood follows close. As we read further and further into the story, we peer deeper into the true nature of Higumedon, and in return, into the violent nature of Mon.

The two’s evil deeds pile up and up, finally reaching the complete attention of Japan and the government. Through them, we meet an amazing cast of characters who all are pulled in by a central force surrounding Mon and the Higumedon, a force that seeks to display each of their different perspectives upon the quickly changing world. From characters like Iijima, an old hunter whose bloodthirst slowly returns after hearing of the Higumedon, to Kanpei Yuri, a laidback prime minister who does everything on his own calculated leisure, to the President of the USA, Hayes Dogwood. TWiM has a rich set of various characters who will challenge each others moral and personal stances, creating a beautiful web of concepts and issues reflecting a fragile world not set into fire by the actions of two violent murderers. What this reveals to me is less about the world and more about what Mon really is.

Mon is a beast of no nation. His character at first relays a distinct level of Macchiavellian intellect, juxtaposed with the instinct and nature of an animal, infant, and caveman. His life revolves around “killing, eating, mating, and hunting”. He has a base level understanding of basic human concepts, but anything about killing, he seems pretty much like a born talent. He thrives mostly on mindless killing, never stopping for a second to ponder upon the weight of his actions. To him, there is only absolute power, no good or bad thing about killing. This is the stance of such biblical tyrants like Nimrod or Ramses II, and such a meticulous position is the stance of those who claim themselves “god”.

But does Mon claim himself one? No, but he desires to be king. King of what exactly? To me, it initially sounds more as a temporal proclamation rather than a clear purpose. Because left on his own, Mon will just be a wandering killing machine. However, it is Toshi that steers the wheel of reason in this dynamic, and, instead of resorting to a classic brain and brawn duality, what they are on a grander scale is Hero and Poet separately: The hero does all the great things and gets credit for it, and the poet composes his verses to further aggrandize his hero in the eyes of men. The Hero can never be the Poet; the Poet can never be the Hero.

And that is what Toshi laments: his awareness of his human limits. It is only through Mon’s brutality that he is pushed to the brink of what he thinks he wants– the power. His pursuit for power is enlivened by his recognition of his weakness and directionless life. Mon is his direction, and pretty soon he is engulfed by Mon’s almost divine presence. Toshi attributes this to fate, on that very night he met Mon under a sign in the sky, and soon his ordinary life changed forever. Mon is his anchor, a light that gives his actions meaning, purpose, and agency, which all fuel his want for that power.

But Toshi still affirms that he is an ordinary person. All the sum of his deeds will never raise him from his permanent state as a “quintessential ordinary human being”. In his own arc shedding light on backstory, we see that he’s led a life that is truly nothing out of the ordinary. However, his lifestyle was all about detachment from expectations about life, and chose to live it as it was. He was intelligently capable of adapting through certain circumstances and adhering to his acquisitive hobby of learning new things, which is how his penchant for making bombs came about. “No anger, no resentment dwelt in his heart” prefaces the larval stage of this early Toshi, creating bombs first from small sizes, content with the thrill of guilt that appeased his complacent nature. As time went on, he created bigger bombs, but he had no power to detonate them, no willing agency to break his little peace with living. The penultimate shift in his life was the entrance of “Maria”, who was the one that promised Toshi that when “the sign appears in the sky you will encounter great power”. That is how he met Mon.

Their dynamic is a power balance clearly dominated by Mon, and Toshi just follows, internalizing whatever Mon inflicts upon him or upon the world. Shaken by this reality paved before him, he finds in him the strength to exclaim, “I am alive!”. Soon, Toshi blows the bigger bombs, Toshi pulls the trigger, Toshi kills people. Though reluctant at first to “partake” in the evil deeds he foresees with Mon, he eventually embraces this new reality. He refuses to think about it, and still lets his motto of “live life as it is” takeover. This has prevented him from acting on his own agency, transformed into an extension of Mon’s murderous desires, ironically blinded from the free will. He is a great case study of a fanatic.

“I am a weak being. It is for the best that I don’t have a great power.”

It was not the bombs that made Toshi shiver with self-awareness of his weakness– It was Mon. Mon is the great power that shattered Toshi’s past and present structures of individuality. The wreck and havoc Toshi-Mon caused reflects first from Toshi’s initiative. What he never was aware of was how he was careless and complacent with handling Mon throughout their carnage, putting his whole blind faith in him. While Mon doesn’t really care about Toshi. Their relationship is akin to commensalism, a symbiotic relationship where one organism benefits while the other is neither helped nor harmed. In this case, only Mon really benefits from the amount of attention he has gained in the end, while Toshi at the end of the manga remains a prisoner of his own free will.

Maria Abeno is also an important character, and her massive role in progressing the Mon identity from demon to prophet. It is hard to separate Maria from the Kierkegaardian ideal of love and faith, where one must first plunge oneself into the absurd, like a leap of faith, and beyond the unfathomable weight of fear and dread. Maria represents the Heaven with all her goodness of character and the utmost inability to reciprocate the actions of Toshi-Mon. She is a the embodiment of Love that Mon cannot understand but only embrace, just like his teddy bear, which fulfill their role of preserving Mon's child-like innocence. But human innocence and Mon's innocence are different, in that one is shaped by society and the other is shaped by nature. Mon has observed the basest abuses and cruelties of people in his childhood and was never shown the act of Love. To him everything he does is natural, and abandoned by his mother to die, Mon never knows comfort until it was bestowed upon to him again by Maria. To Toshi, Maria at first is a threat to the partnership he and Mon has, especially to the bloody tie they both share. He tries to peel down Maria's delusion about choice and the morality of killing, and lambasts her by trying to stir her hypocrisy about vengeance.

Infant, Caveman, Animal-- Mon represent the rawest idealization of "Earth", and his statement about only him residing on Earth reveals he doesn't know yet about Maria. Here we have Heaven and Earth, but no Honored One-- yet.

Higumedon is an essential being to Mon's growth as an individual and the key to unlocking his unique role on Earth. On their first encounter against each other, Mon is overwhelmed with Higumedon's presence, almost as if he was Moses before the Burning Bush, full of new dread and fear that challenges the limit of his understanding. Mon acts upon his nature, and the Better Nature dominates him and enlightens him through the only language he can decipher-- violence.

This new phase of Mon exhibits more human sensitivity and less of his monstrosity. Now he is able to feel pain, to briefly think about himself, and hesitate to kill others. This phase of Mon is him in his pupa stage, shifting through conflicting information and previous relevant memories. Remember the bear? After the First Encounter with Higumedon, Mon and Toshi wake up unscathed, but Mon finds his teddy bear battered and bruised. This is the latent sign of his primal barrier breaking, and with that he is thrown into a world of his own unmaking. But still, all he knows about living is killing.

Even through Maria's soulful moment with convincing Mon to finally stop killing and going by Toshi's whims, she makes one very big mistake and that is assuming she know what Mon's complete nature is. Mon new phase is somewhat of an acceptance, emboldened by the love from Maria. He is reassured in his own language of living, which is killing, and he does it but now with unchained embrace and superhuman control of his abilities. Maria goes into dramatic change, locking her into a state of shock.

What finally "awakens" Mon is when Maria is killed, and he experiences a new sensation-- and that is powerlessness. Mon has been mouthing "Power is Absolute" without really understanding the truth of it (truth as he always pursued after) and only after realizing the value of Heaven (Maria) and losing it, was enlightenment granted to him by Higumedon. It is respect that begets power, and Mon understands this respecting first the monster (Higumedon) and then respecting Life. His newfound practice of rock balancing symbolizes his expression of regret for every living soul he has ever killed. He becomes somewhat of a prophet now, preaching message of optimism to every human being, gifted with the ability of empathy (not fucking kidding this is not like Life is Strange) to repair the discord between warring nations and help them come to a peaceful understanding. From demon to prophet, Mon becomes a beacon of hope for mankind and the whole world all look up to him, seemingly forgetting the monster he was in Japan.

From that point, he is the Honored One betwixt Heaven and Earth.

Hideki Arai brings forth absurdist violence really early to make a point. It is almost a caveat for people to know what they are getting themselves into, an almost one volume sneak peek to gauge which ones will really appreciate the extreme boundaries Arai doesn’t care about. The first aspects I noticed about his art was the skillful setup of contrasting moments, his versatility at laying out action sequences, and masterful placement of that “punch”. Arai’s character designs clearly communicate their character quintessence; they each have their own unique quirk or mannerism they do throughout the manga, like Akira Kurosawa characters. You can also deduce the kind of person they are even solely from their eyes, which express a lot of identity and the moral alignment they have. You can see characters especially like Toshi and Mon change eye shape dramatically through significant events in the manga. All in all, this artistic prowess made me stick through reading the manga to the very end.

some nitpicks:

What made me emotionally disconnected was how excessive the violence was, blood and gore and all that. I know Arai has purpose for all of this, but to me early on it already established itself as a manga that glorified pointless killing (in vein with Ichi the Killer), and that made it hard for me to shake off the personal bias that I might have clouded over TWiM. Actually, it wasn’t much of a bias, but more or less, like I said, an emotional disconnect that made it hard for the manga to hit for me with moments fans said hit for them. Mostly, the Higumedon x Mon chapters were the ones that really pulled my attention in and I am quite sad we did not get more of those, and the final encounter between them was kind of sidelined quickly in the epilogue. Toshi x Mon moments did not resound in me most of the time, but seeing Toshi’s arc explain everything about why he is hungry for power helped a bit with outlining the duality between him and Mon. Maria x Mon was easily the best dichotomy in the manga, but it did not please me how Arai exercises his bloody humor, even though I could see it from a mile away.

I liked how we got a “what was Mon?” chapter, but not an ample and comprehensible “what is Mon?” section within the story from Arai himself, and we get the former too far in the very last chapters of the manga. I would have loved it if Arai elaborated on what Mon’s true nature was, because I think Arai wanted to present Mon as more of an object of changing implicity whose themes were shaped through introspection. Thus, although he is easily my favorite character in the manga, I didn’t find him moving for me since the rest of his character was still in the shadows, and at the end he just reappears suddenly as this enlightened being uniting the whole world. It could've benefited from more build-up and connection. Toshi's ending was befitting for a man who forgotten and then remembered he was only human.

As a whole, I have not much that to say about TWiM, but that the short lucubration I took after reading it helped me appreciate more the internal messages Hideki Arai finely tuned and crafted within. I guess the plot on its own is a good sociopolitical and supernatural commentary, and it is the thematic webwork within that really turns it up a notch.