Cat-Eyed Boy: The Perfect Edition, Volume 1 by Kazuo Umezz Review

Monsters spook people while the Cat-Eyed Boy watches on. That pretty much sums up every story in Kazuo Umezz’s Cat-Eyed Boy, Volume 1, the least compelling manga of his I’ve read to date.

This edition is made up of five stories of varying lengths, none of which were any good. Like another of Umezz’s books Orochi, the titular character is a framing device for the ensuing story, though the Cat-Eyed Boy stories are more yokai(Japanese for “monster”)-focused, and the character occasionally plays a bigger role in the stories than simply the audience stand-in/observer.

The Immortal Man is about a deformed man who bothers the kid of a rich family - with a secret. The Ugly Demon is about a physically ugly kid who grows up to be an ugly person on the inside who does ugly things. The Tsunami Summoners is a Cat-Eyed Boy origin story as well as being about some yokai wanting to bring a tsunami to destroy the nearby village for some reason.

The One-Legged Monster of Oudai is the least memorable story here and is basically about a monster showing up to say boo to a bunch of people. Which is essentially the outline for the final and longest story, The Band of One Hundred Monsters, Part One, where a number of monsters frighten people, among them a manga artist and a politician.

It’s an odd collection. The writing is very childish (the Band of One Hundred Monsters have a yokai handbook and business cards, with the stated aim “to bring fear and shock upon this world”!) and yet the art and general content clearly isn’t intended for kids. Childish adults then, perhaps? Which I am, but I needed more sophisticated storytelling than what there is on offer in this book.

Cat-Eyed Boy, Volume 1 is full of clunky, hammy pseudo-horror manga that hasn’t aged well since it first appeared decades ago. I was bored and unimpressed throughout and won’t be checking out further books in the series. Kazuo Umezz is a decent mangaka though I would recommend his better series, The Drifting Classroom, over Cat-Eyed Boy if you’re interested in this creator.