So last night, I wandered outside around 3 AM or so. I don't remember why I went out, but soon I found myself wandering around in a forest which is very odd considering I live in a heavily populated city.
But it was in this dark forest that I came upon a very odd sight. There was a cow. Or at least, I think it was a cow. Anyways, when I got near this strange looking cow, it looked at me. Into the very windows of my soul. It was only when it looked at me that I realized why it looked strange.
Its face was human. And as I stood there absolutely dumbstruck, its mouth opened, and by god, this human cow spoke.
“YOU ARE GOING TO REVIEW BAD HORROR MANGA FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.”
...I don't really have any idea what it meant by that.
#Introduction#
Kudan no Gotoshi is a horror manga by Jun Watanabe and… it’s not very good. But it’s not the sort that I would say isn’t worth the time.
Thankfully, there’s quite a lot of weird stuff packed into this series that on the surface, is about a bunch of youngster college students encountering a strange human faced cow in the woods and that cow proceeding to tell them they only have a week left until one of them dies.
And then at the end of the next week, another one will die. And so forth until they’re all dead. So sayeth the cow.
Like that by itself could have been its own horror series. A bad one, and eventually, you’d probably be unable to stop the reader from asking “but why a cow, though?” but that may have been preferable.
This is going to be a FULL SPOILERS review. Because I can’t really talk about how fucking weird it gets without going into the incomprehensible plot. So yeah, there’s your warning.
The conclusion of the review without going into the gory details is that it is very bad. But I still would most definitely recommend reading it. Because this is one of those cases where I honestly cannot tell where the line between bad writing and just downright insanity lies.
#Absolute Nonsense#
It’s real hard to review a series when at the end of it, you’re still not exactly sure what just happened. That’s why more than a couple of my reviews are just me attempting to break down what I just experienced. This is especially prevalent when it is a horror series.
So, okay. The spoiler warning has been thrown out already… so the question is, what happened in this series?
It started out as Final Destination but rather than the invisible hand of death, the being that would bring about the downfall of characters was a cow bearing the face of a relative or friend of someone among those witnessing it.
And the meat of the series takes place in these week long periods leading up to a character’s predicted death. This is both where the series gets interesting as well as messy. As believe it or not, while none of these characters are very interesting or unique, I found myself surprisingly getting sucked into watching as these characters spent their last weeks of life.
As there’s an odd rule attached to the curse of the cow. None of these characters can die until the time that the cow has prophesied. ~~Until later in the manga when the cow curse just stops mattering.~~
Meaning if they try to kill themselves, get stabbed to death, or shot repeatedly… they come back to life. Or rather, they just don’t die at all.
And sure enough when I thought to myself “sure it sucks that they’re gonna die soon but isn’t it kind of a big deal that they’re literally immortal for the time being???” one of the characters goes to a yakuza boss to offer him a deal to utilize his immortality.
Leading to an outright shameless descent into gory schlock where this glasses character who I think was just a college student basically enters a gunfight with an entire office’s worth of yakuza and kills all of them.
At this point of the manga, I'm basically cheering it on. I thought this was going to be a miserably long and boring manga about a cow and now I’m being dealt ridiculous over the top violence.
~~Before this, the girl that liked the first guy to get Final Destination’d was going to fucking outright murder his childhood bully but then showed restraint. I’m so glad Jun Watanabe changed his mind and decided that this manga DID need murder later with glasses boy.~~
But as much as I would love for glasses character to be our protagonist, it’s instead other guy. Other guy is a sort of weird character in that he keeps trying to kill himself throughout the manga, even once before the cow curse even happens and he survives it. I know I’m vividly describing him as “other guy”, but he genuinely is probably the most interesting character of the bunch.
However, it’s not really earned. It’s that thing where you just fucking overload a single character with all of this mysterious shit. This manga just fucking descends into complete and utter chaos the more that is revealed about our protagonist. Like for instance.... how he doesn’t actually exist.
Like at first, the cow talks some shit about how they were supposed to die at the beginning of the manga in their car because they were going too fast.
~~But also when they all found the human faced cow, their immediate reaction was just to savagely beat it to death. Actually, I think they straight up hit it and then decided to beat it to death after realizing cows aren't supposed to have human faces. The point is, couldn't this whole thing have just been summed up with hey it's the spirit of the cow and it wants revenge! No? I mean... it would have been simpler.~~
But then the protagonist thinks the cow curse is because as a kid he got hit and run’d and maybe the Final Destination cow is actually angry at him for that. Because then it’s revealed that he did die, because the guy who did the hit and run tried to apologize at main character’s funeral but nobody accepted his apology so he killed himself and became the original cow that cursed the group?
~~I should really be calling it the kudan. But… nah.~~
But also the main character is clearly not dead, which causes the daughter of the guy who did the hit and run on the main character that killed himself to want revenge on this strange being that died and yet is alive so she lied and eventually became his girlfriend and...
...See? All this shit needed to be about was a spooky cow with a human face and instead I’m tearing my hair out to try and decipher what the fuck
Anyways. It turns out that odds are very good that his odd state of existence means the main character is probably the cursed one. The cursed one being the character that has to be eliminated to end the curse that is killing off everyone else in the group. Peace can’t actually be restored unless this fake being that doesn’t actually exist is… wait…. wasn’t this exact plot device in another series I reviewed before?
...Point is, the main character wasn’t even that bad of a character. Honestly, I was actually interested in him up until the revelation that he’s actually a fake person. It just obliterates his character. I mean maybe him like having multiple past lives could have been interesting, but nothing is ever done with it. Instead, the reader learns that this character is actually a fake person, and it’s just right back to dealing with the cow and the curse.
Then there’s this sketchy professor character who the group goes to for help dealing with their kudan problem and… his character is horrible. It’s all over the place. Most of the manga he’s acting like a complete asshole and is only out for himself. At one point he locks up the group in his basement just so it’d be easier to survey them. Which leads to him getting a sample of the kudan’s DNA which he was going to use to… I guess to just prove its existence and become famous?
But then by the end of the manga, all of a sudden, he’s frantically calling his ex-wife to try and get her to leave Tokyo with their son because the professor has become aware of the impending apocalyptic situation that was going to be on their hands. And of course his ex-wife didn’t believe him because I didn’t believe him. What is this shit? You’re going to try and give humanity to this character who’s been an asshole the entire manga at the very last second???
Oh.
Fair enough.
Still this character took up so much time of this manga, it genuinely feels like just a waste. Failed to help the characters in any way. Rather, one of his attempts of helping was to get a doctor he was friends with to remove all the organs of one of the members of the group before it was her time to die to… try and… I honestly don’t know.
Medicine has come a long way, but I’m pretty sure you can’t just remove every single organ from someone’s body and then put it back and expect them to come back to life. Like the whole idea is I guess they could protect her organs at like the destined moment when she’s supposed to die, but couldn’t the destined moment just be when they’re literally removing every single vital organ she has??? The logical conclusion they all should have reached was that the doctor was probably going to be the one who ended up killing her.
And of course he does, but not as he logically should have. Instead, the kudan decided to spook him for no reason and it terrifies the absolute shit out of him so he attacks it and kills it dead and oh no, the hallucination is actually the girl… wow. I’m glad that the cow is purposely vague with the prophecies.
“YOU ARE GOING TO DIE IN SEVEN DAYS WHEN A SKETCHY PROFESSOR GETS HIS DOCTOR FRIEND TO TRY AND TAKE ALL OF YOUR ORGANS OUT OF YOU TO TRY AND ESCAPE YOUR FATED DEATH. YOUR FATED DEATH IS I SPOOK THE DOCTOR AND HE JUST BRUTALLY KILLS YOU WITH HIS SCALPEL IN A GENUINE ATTEMPT TO REMOVE YOUR HEART TO SAVE YOUR LIFE.”
…
“UH, I WASN’T SUPPOSED TO TELL YOU ALL OF THAT. PRETEND YOU DIDN'T HEAR THAT AND I TOLD YOU WERE JUST GOING TO DIE IN SEVEN DAYS.”
Speaking of characters that caused me to scratch my head in confusion, the third girl character of the original group of friends is… she’s basically just a part of the background for most of the manga up until a point. Suddenly, she just starts spouting crazy culty religion shit. ~~To be fair, they do show her like praying and shit but it really seemed like a sudden leap. "Oh you know, I'm a genuine believer and I do believe that God exists and MY PURPOSE ON THIS WORLD IS TO GIVE BIRTH TO THE NEW MESSIAH."~~ And like when they realize that the main character is a fake person, she starts calling him a God and she wants to bear God's child and…
...she more or less pushes him into having sex with her at his weakest moment after he’s realized his entire life is a lie and that he has no family because she wants to conceive a child of God. And I’m just sitting here thinking back to the start of the manga when these characters were just one big group of ordinary friends.
But crazy religious girl immediately just fucking abandons main character and says she doesn’t need him anymore because she thinks she’s become immediately pregnant with the main character’s child and we, as the reader, think she’s completely out of her fucking gourd (because she is) and…
Then she gives birth (or rather she has her stomach ripped open from the inside out) to a younger version of the main character who then...
...immediately begins the apocalypse via… a virus… a pathogen... or something…? He says some cryptic shit to the protagonist and then he melts into the sewer.
And also there’s been a widescale pandemic of people seeing kudans and getting told they were going to die even though the original kudan was just one of the girl character’s father but...
He was still aware of his identity somehow...? I mean, what was his goal then??? Or did he not want to be a doomsayer cow? There was like a scene where I think it was supposed to be emotional where the original cow who was the father like disappears or something but like the rest of the manga, I was just baffled and trying to understand what emotion I was supposed to be feeling.
~~If I'm being a 100% honest, several months have progressed from the time I wrote the introduction of this review to this point. I thought maybe with more time to think about this series I could piece it together a bit better, but rereading my own descriptions of the plot, it just reads like absolute and utter nonsense.~~
So then the apocalypse happens, and the main character who's some weird entity that isn't human gets burned to death along with his girlfriend but he decides even though humans are all awful idiots to somehow save the world for his girlfriend...?
I mean it pretty much looked like hell on earth. Like a whole crowd of people saw a fucking demon skull faced cow materialize from the charred remains of the main character's son, and then proceeded to brutally kill and set two people on fire. So... what, did he have time powers?
The pathogen just fucking disappeared and everybody lived ever happily ever? What? Excuse me?
Fucking excuse me? This would be where I'd normally just transition to the conclusion for comedic effect but what the fuc
#Conclusion#
...How can you read a thing, and then afterward have absolutely no idea what happened in it or why anything happened in it, and still somehow recommend it?
If a series is going to be absolute and utter nonsense, I think the creator really needs to keep dishing out the crazy. You don't want the reader stopping to think "none of this makes any fucking sense at all." You want the reader to be thinking "holy fucking christ where are they going with this???"
Like that sounds easy to accomplish, but it's been quite a while since I read a horror series of both this quality and length quickly. But I just could not put it down. I needed to know where it was going to go and now that I do know, I have no fucking idea why or how it ended up there.
But nevertheless, I was super entertained. So while I may be giving this series a low score of 35 out of 100 or a 3.5 out of 10, I would in the same breath genuinely recommend reading this.
