Reiji’s about to graduate high school but, though he has the grades to go to university, he can’t bring himself to leave his long-suffering mother to deal with her dementia-addled gran and violent shut-in brother all by herself. Stuck behind in his futureless small town where he’s beholden to childhood bullies and a low-paying construction job, one of the few rays of light in his bleak life is his favourite idol band, Acrylic. So why is the lead singer of the band suddenly working in the local conbini…?
Boy’s Abyss has a lot of intriguing elements to it that addresses timely things like depression/offing yourself, loneliness, and the pressure to succeed, that you don’t normally see in mainstream comics, let alone manga, which drew me to the series. Ryo Minenami’s first volume sets up the series well but also doesn’t do much else besides this so it’s a bit unsatisfying overall.
I’m glad Minenami has chosen the tricky subject of slip’n’slide to write about because it’s prevalent everywhere, in every era, and yet often ignored. It’s always been a tragic feature of teen years for centuries - the Romantics appropriately enough romanticised dying young, it’s appeared in famous works of literature like Romeo and Juliet and The Sorrows of Young Werther, and these aren’t even the tip of the iceberg.
The reasoning for Reiji and fallen idol Nagi’s choice of a slip’n’slide pact is immature at best, but they’re also basically kids (Reiji is 17, Nagi is 20). Still, Minenami captures the feeling of despair at that age, where you feel like you can see your whole life already laid out ahead of you, not realising that you really don’t know anything and that your life is just beginning and will change constantly, for better as well as worse. And Reiji’s life is pretty wretched, which makes his choice convincing, while Nagi’s is… shrouded in mystery for the most part. Intentionally so, to entice you on (it worked dammit!).
There’s a lotta contrivances in the narrative: how Reiji’s favourite band is Acrylic and the lead singer just happened to choose his small town to escape to, and then the two instantly fall in love, and other reveals about Nagi’s life, like their method of dying happening to be just like… well, no spoilers here. But it’s not contrived in a way that makes me dislike the story in any way either - it still comes across as a compelling and unique narrative. And while the artwork is generic manga style, Minenami’s art is definitely skilful and polished - the bewbage is a bit gratuitous though.
The problem with a series is that sometimes a great story gets stretched out across multiple middling volumes instead of being told in a single brilliant book. We get that with Boy’s Abyss where I feel like Minenami has hit upon a good story but, for whatever reason (usually financial), we’re getting it in dribs and drabs.
This first volume has me hooked but doesn’t do much besides table-setting and then ends on a cliffhanger so I felt the book to be overall a little light and unsatisfying. I definitely want to see where this strange story goes though so I’ll keep going with it and would recommend this one to manga fans who are into darker material than the usual peppy stuff.
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