TW: Sexual Assault

Higanjima, Matsumoto Kōji's first and only manga series is baffling. Both to read and then to think about as a story. And it is a shame because I quite like the first few chapters of this manga. The opening pages are thrilling, a mysterious character with a face mask and glasses killing what seems to be a rabid vampire in this very surgical and calculated way yet it could not have been done a more violent and brutal manner. I loved that. What follows, though, is not as tense nor as enthralling.

Higanjima as a story has an active identity crisis. It does not know which to be first, a terrifying horror story that will always keep you on your toes? Or an awesome violent battle shōnen? It jumps from one to the other on a moments notice and does not let you take in the aura of either. The story itself after the first few volumes is very straight forward. A guy and his friends go to a scary vampire island, vampires kill most of the guy's friends, the guy is angry at the vampires and then the story just kind of follows the main guy trying to kill the king of the vampires— who I can only describe as Dio if he wasn't gay so you're just left with this weird, greasy evil dude. That's mainly what holds back Higanjima. It is the fact that is a continuous story. In my eyes if this was a collection of many short pieces about scary monsters it would've been great. Kōji has the artistic ability to do that. But since this is a serialized manga it loses that punch of a good, short horror story. It needs to keep the status quo, characters don't die, elements of the story get explained when instead they should've been kept hidden and everything that makes horror great was ignored in order to make a bland bland battle shōnen that tries to act as a tough seinen for big boys. But it really isn't.

Along with its identity crisis, Higanjima is also actively scared of any challenging decisions that could've made the manga better. Everything relies on the fact that its cool. It's cool to fight vampires with a katana, it's even cool to fight big monsters with a katana. Some characters do the same but a different weapon. No one ever really loses or dies and when they do it barely ever does affect the plot in a meaningful way. For a story that is very much not for kids it feels immature. Not to mention the amount of fetishistic content such as the of scenes of sexual assault against female characters. A lot of just unneeded, naked breasts in general and there's a scene in particular where upon seeing a giant spider monster a character points out how the monster had like old, saggy breasts. That was just insane to me.

The moments when Higanjima does decide to go in a more horror oriented direction are great however. Matsumoto Kōji is amazing is post cosmic and body horror. Because there aren't solely vampires, since this manga is so long they decide to introduce so bigger monsters as well. You get countless unique and interesting designs of creatures that feel monstrous, impossible, simply beyond human understanding. In certain moments I genuinely felt quite tense. Kōji's art style has unique quality to it, where the human character designs come off as cartoonish looking but the monsters don't look like that. It's all sharp teeth, strange morphed bodies or even the regular vampires can look quite scary in certain moments. And seeing those cartoony-looking characters in moments of sheer terror makes the overall imagery even more chilling.

But considering the length of this piece and how far little and in between those moments are, I don't think Higanjima all too much worth reading.