Mizushiro Setona - After School Nightmare, vol. 01-04 (Eng. trans.)

[oyceter]

This is possibly the oddest thing I've read all year, and I read Le Chevalier d'Eon this year.

Mashiro Ichijo has just been told that he needs to take a special after-school class in order to graduate. The classroom is in a basement that didn't previously exist, and instead of desks, the room is lined with canopy beds. It turns out that he will be entering a dream world and confronting his own worst nightmare. Several other classmates of his are in there as well, though they take different forms in the nightmare/dream world.

Mashiro's terrified that people will discover that his upper half is male, but his lower half is female, and things are further complicated when his male classmate Sou starts pursuing him romantically and when he's attracted to his female classmate Kureha as well.

As you might be able to tell from the premise, this series takes on questions of gender identity. I still can't tell if I like the politics or not; Mizushiro makes some assumptions that I keep wanting to question (why does liking Sou back mean identifying as female? what's so bad about being a woman? and I think the second is implied not only through Mashiro's fear of discovery, but also through the roles women have to play in the series so far and in the other Mizushiro series I've read). But the world is surreal and dreamy, edges bleeding together between the dream world and the real world, which seems less and less real as the series goes on.

Images that struck me: a girl so cut off that she shows up in the dream world as a body with a hole through her head and her chest instead of a face and a heart. Someone who manifests as long snaky arms, constantly grabbing and holding and winding around people. Empty desks and lockers at the school.

And the art is absolutely gorgeous; I mean to buy these just so I can have the color pages that GoComi includes.

Recommended for anyone who likes the strange and subtly creepy, particularly with a massive dose of gender identity issues.

Comments

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

I don't know if severely insane theories need spoiler text, but just to be safe:

[/cracked-out theory]

[oyceter]

Oh, I like that!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oh, very interesting! But what about the creepy alternate ego in the dream world?

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

That's something I've actually been pondering.[/more cracked-out theories]

[oyceter]

I keep thinking she's a ghost as well! I don't know why... mostly it's the letters. Or I think that she only exists in the dreamverse, or something odd like that.

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

Really, the thing that started for me it was that in the first volume she writes that letter berating Sou for kissing Mashiro in the elevator...but Sou and Mashiro were the only ones there, so how did she find out what happened? (Assuming that Sou didn't tell her himself, which doesn't seem likely.)

I'm sure it's just one of a billion things in the series that's going to stay a mystery for quite a while. *fidget*