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Reviewed by James Hanrahan There is an urban legend in Japan that if you go to a certain website at midnight and enter the name of someone you hate or has wronged you, then you can send them straight to hell. There is a price, however: if you choose to send someone to hell for eternal torment, know then that once you live out your natural lifespan, no matter how well you lived the rest of your life, that you, too, will go to hell for eternity. That's the premise of this volume. This book starts off promisingly enough, with a lengthy first story, laying out in detail how one young girl is antagonized by a classmate to the point she feels she must access the hell website to free herself. Submitting a name to the website causes an agent of vengeance to appear, in the form of a serious looking middle-school girl named Enma Ai. Enma Ai is Hell's agent on Earth, and has the power to spirit people away, but she always gives her client a chance to consider their self-damning request. It's a good bit of horror-lite. Unfortunately, the following stories are shorter and spend less time with character development; they are repetitive, and the characters are interchangeable from story to story. Even as the villains of the pieces become progressively more unsavory, what could have been a pretty charming collection of stories about human nature and gothic horror quickly becomes humdrum in its formulaic repetition. That might sound a bit harsh, but I'd like to point out a few things about "Hell Girl". Due to cultural differences, this series is marketed for older teens by Del Rey, but in Japan this book is a tie-in product for an animated property that already spawned several animated series and a live action drama. The stories in this collection were originally published in a monthly anthology titled Nakayoshi and a sister publication, Nakayoshi Lovely, and its intended audience was primarily elementary school and middle-school aged girls. This, I think, would go a long way toward explaining the simplicity of the stories and the bright shoujo look to the art. Certainly the glimpses into Hell we see lean much more toward the idea of what Hell might be for Japanese elementary school students as they tend to feature a strong message of "everybody is gonna know what you did" and denizens of Hell pointing and laughing at offenders. Author Miyuki Eto has been a regular contributor to Nakayoshi, and states in an annotation that she could not draw "Hell Girl" as grimly as its source material-- she goes on to say that she likes drawing things bright and sparkly anyway. I am hoping for better character development and further backstory of Enma Ai and her assistants in later volumes of this series, but I'm still going to give it a grade of C- because I don't think everyone in Del Rey's intended older teen market will know or excuse the facts behind the book. That, and it feels pricey for losing my interest so quickly. Comment on this review of Hell Girl v1 on the Manga Life Forums. |
19 November 2008
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