Jacaranda

Wow. What a nice looking tre--OH MY GOD EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE.

Jacaranda is a horror manga by Kotobuki Shiriagari and it’s… it’s horrible. It’s just unbelievably awful. Almost to the point where I can’t even review it. But yet it’s so unbelievably bad that I saw it floating at the very bottom of my manga list and I thought…

“No, I have to.”

It’d be an insult to all of the other awful horror series I’ve reviewed over the years if I gave this thing a pass just because I think there’s not a whole lot to say other than… well, it’s awful. That's the entire review. It's just awful.

It just starts immediately with a woman brutally beating an old man to death because he leaned against her on a train. Or at the very least, she hurt him pretty bad. I’m actually not sure if she just killed him. It’s really hard to tell what’s happening at any point in this series.

It’s not like this is a bad way to start off your series. Granted yes, it is a pretty downer note to start out on. Yet my issue with this is that… it doesn’t matter at all? Actually, the manga itself basically states it doesn’t matter.

As the newsperson just immediately fumbles to the next item of news which is a bikini model posing for some daring photos…

Don’t you get it? It’s like real life society, man. The newscasters are so grim and only care about their ratings. Death sells! Talk more about people dying! And once you lure them in with news of tragedies and death, hit them with the gossip of the bikini model! Keep them hooked!

I can’t even tell which would be worse. If this manga is actually a view into how this author sees the world or if they’re just fucking with us. ~~I'm genuinely unsure which one it is.~~ Like say what you will about newscasters, I don’t think the majority of them would just so flippantly skip past a story about a woman brutally assaulting an elderly person. Or that literally nobody on the train watching it happen would intervene.

Like how little hope in the human race do you have to have to think that nobody would defend an elderly person being attacked in a crowded place like a train?

...Anyways, what this manga is actually about is a killer tree that explodes.

...Yeah, that’s right. The old person getting assaulted literally doesn’t matter as the actual focus of the manga is this weird tree that just sprouts up randomly and starts exploding the city. But that intro bit about how this person sees society is way, way more interesting than… an exploding tree? ~~Or rather, the roots of the tree are fucking up the gas lines and that’s what’s causing the explosions???~~

There’s no character, it’s not a monster, it’s just a fucking giant tree. That causes explosions.

Rather than a plot or characters, this manga is 300 pages of violence, explosions, vehicles wrecking, and just death. And you know what? Even though there’s absolutely no substance behind it, I would have been completely fine with this except…

The art is… really bad.

If your manga is gonna be nothing but gore and explosions, your art really needs to be on point. Instead, I’m just looking at a pure mess. We see one or a couple of characters for a page or so, an explosion or wreck happens, and then it shifts to a new bunch of characters, and then another explosion happens, and so on. As I was reading this manga, I just found myself thinking back to when I was a kid and would just doodle stick figures killing each other.

This entire manga just reminds me of that. Like I can just imagine the author whipping these pages out.

"Okay, what if like a car flies into the air and crashes into this other one, or like a badly burned woman wanders down a train tunnel and then oh no, here comes the train! And skyscrapers just fall one after another!!!!"

Even if I wanted to take this manga seriously, it is impossible for any of the catastrophe to have an impact because it never stops. You have to give the reader at least a little breathing room but instead... it's just explosion after explosion... it just comes off as so comical when it should be anything but.

Though, the true punchline of this manga is definitely the author's afterword.

...That’s not at all the afterword I expected to read after the manga I had just read. As a matter of fact, if this afterword didn’t exist, I probably wouldn’t have felt the need to actually write a review on this.

You can’t have it both ways. You just can't.

You can’t do a manga of this caliber that is basically just 80% explosion and then start going on about interpretations.

Also, that bit about like him boasting about not including any sort of narrative device and like this manga essentially being a 300 page long 4-koma strip…?

I can’t even fathom thinking either of those things as good. When I do negative reviews I do genuinely try and understand what the creators were trying to go for, but I just cannot… wrap my head around...

For one, a narrative device could have helped a great deal. Or at the very least, I may have not had a roaring headache by the end of the 300 pages. Secondly, there’s a reason why 4-koma strips are… strips.

If you take a singular 4-koma strip, and for some reason expand it to an ungodly 300 pages... what would that even be? Like how would you be able to stretch it out to 300 pages without it getting incredibly old?

You would just end up with this manga. Like a nonstop 300 page long series of explosions and gore sounds like it'd be great and fun in concept, but it's not. It fucking sucks. It's not interesting. It's not very pleasant to look at. There's no end of apocalypse manga out there. ~~Though, this isn't an apocalypse manga to begin with since the jacaranda tree only shows up in Tokyo I think.~~ Several of which actually possess characters, narrative devices, plot, interesting settings, twists! All sorts of things!

If I had a gun put to my head and I was made to choose between reading this or another horror manga that's just absolutely fucking disgusting and filled to the brim with offensive content but that manga still possessed characters and a plot...? I would choose that manga over Jacaranda every single time.

Jacaranda is a 1 out of 100 and an absolute and utter waste of time.