This review contains major spoilers for the majority of the reviewed material. Keep that in mind before continuing.

Qualia The Purple is an autobiography of a deity hiding inside a psychological thriller. It is a love story about a girl who steals the first kiss of a robot. It is about a brutal mahou shoujou who ruthlessly destroys evildoers long before they commit their crimes. It is about dying in a plane crash and waking up in your room earlier that day. It is a simple school life comedy about four friends, one of whom is a girl with very strange purple eyes.

Qualia The Purple is a lot of things. Over 18 chapters (plus some intermissions), it might just count as one of the single wildest rides in the entire medium. There really is not a lot else like this. But as with all stories, we should start at the beginning. For a while, Qualia presents Yukari Marii as its central mystery. She is a girl with deep purple eyes who perceives other human beings as robots--human-sized mecha, if you would. The first few chapters alone segue from a light school dramedy centering on Yukari and her friend Manabu “Gaku” Hatou to being about the more unusual implications of Yukari’s powers. We find out that the police enlist her to help with catching murder suspects. Eventually Yukari and Hatou get caught up in the case of a dismembering serial killer, who kidnaps the both of them. To make quit a long story very short, Yukari is able to subdue the killer and use her eyes to “fix” Hatou, relieved of one of her arms by the serial killer.

In a lesser manga, this’d be all Qualia has to offer. Greasy crimes and Hatou and Yukari solving them. In reality though, Qualia is such a bizarre, unwinding narrative that it’s difficult to actually know where to start. Hatou, let’s get this out of the way, is the real main character of Qualia. When Yukari “fixed” her, she did so using parts from a cellphone, giving her hand the ability to be used as a phone. Initially, she only uses this power to call Yukari (who is the only person who has her cell number), but as the narrative goes on, a mysterious transfer student named Alice enters the picture, pestering Yukari to join an organization for “geniuses” like them called JAUNT. Yukari, eventually, joins. Yukari is killed. Hatou discovers she can call versions of herself from parallel universes, and the manga well and truly flies off the rails, to which it never really returns. All for the better, as said, Qualia The Purple is one of the most shamelessly you’ll-never-guess-what-happens-next page-turners in all of manga.

What starts as Hatou trying to solve Yukari’s murder explodes out into her discovering that she can use her multiversal cellphone to change the past. And from there Qualia quickly shifts form into an exploration of how far someone can go to save someone they love. Throughout countless universes and across billions of years of history; Hatou steals, kills, betrays, and has the same done to her. Any version of herself that fails to save Yukari is expendable, and despite lifetimes of trying, every single one does indeed fail. It’s really quite hard to convey the sheer scope of the storytelling going on here. We see a good chunk of these realities--some in more detail, some in less. In each we’re made privy to Hatou’s thought process as she tries to work out if this is what will finally save her beloved Yukari. It makes it hit even harder each time that she fails.

There is a happy ending buried in all this. After all of her instances across many timelines effectively “merge”, leaving Hatou as a nameless godlike being, she travels back to beginning of the universe. Waiting the 13 billion-odd years out, she finds that in this world, Yukari survives. At this point, Hatou is little more than the narration boxes, which Yukari can promptly percieve and begins talking to. Convincing her that she can’t actually change reality in the way she’s trying to, Hatou returns to being a normal girl, and her memories of being a multiversal singularity begin to fade.

None of this short summary really does the series’ writing justice. It’s an endlessly interesting thing. Flawed, to be sure, but fascinating. Qualia is what you get if you adapt some high-concept sci-fi to the manga format, and really it’s a good case that there should be more of such a thing. There is a truly silly amount of half-correct babble about quantum mechanics that the series could probably have well done without. That aside though, the writing is strong even if the characters are rather broad. The art too deserves praise, often staying subdued when it needs to and then breaking out into more impressively cosmic displays when the narrative calls for it.

All in all, it comes highly recommended. There’s not too much out there like this.