Inuyashiki Volume 5 doesn’t feature the title character! Instead it’s all about what psychotic teen serial killer Shishigami did next. Which is plain confusing to me.
Initially Shishigami seemed like a one-dimensional bad guy: he gets the same robot powers as Inuyashiki but uses them for evil for seemingly no other reason than he’s an evil little shit. Except we could see in how he cared about his mother that he’s got something of a heart – which only makes his previous actions all the more baffling. Sociopaths aren’t empathetic or selfless, right?
So in this fifth book we see him again weeping over his mother and then slowly falling in love with – and obviously caring about – the needy classmate who’s sheltering him, and her grandma. Aww, he’s human! Except he’s also going back to murdering people in cold blood!? But wait – he’s also helping to cure people of their illnesses!
What IS this character - how are we meant to feel about him?? It’s less complex character-building so much as it is contradictory and arbitrary behaviour, like Hiroya Oku himself hasn’t quite made up his mind about Shishigami.
For that reason alone, Inuyashiki Volume 5 is an unpredictable read with some amusingly silly moments like when Shishigami goes off on a rampage, targeting 4Chan-esque trolls via their webcams! But it still feels like a disjointed, rather childish and shallow story that knows it wants to be edgy and cerebral but doesn’t know how to convincingly pull that off.
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