The Spring 2022 Manga Guide

Welcome Back, Alice

What's It About? 

Yohei, Kei and Yui are childhood friends and things get complicated when Yohei witnesses Kei and Yui in an intimate moment. But when Kei unexpectedly moves away and returns a few years later to reunite in high school, he seems to be a bit different.

Welcome Back, Alice has story and art by Shūzō Oshimi and English translation by Daniel Komen. Kodansha Comics will release its first volume both digitally and physically for $7.99 and $12.95 respectively.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

In his afterword, Shūzō Oshimi says that this series is about deconstructing masculine sexuality and sex drive. That's no doubt a worthy subject, but I'm not sold on the way it's being examined here. Kei, the more-or-less antagonist of the piece, left Tokyo as a boy and returned as “done being a boy,” which seems to equate more to nonbinary than transgender as portrayed in the story – Kei wears the girls' uniform and is feminine-presenting, but has no problem with using the boys' restroom at school, striding right up to the urinals while classmates watch. Again, this in and of itself isn't an issue, because gender can be expressed in a variety of ways. The issue is that Kei seems to be deliberately using his (their? the book uses masculine pronouns, so I will too) gender and sexuality to wreak havoc on his childhood friends, Yo and Yui. He's playing with them like the sexual equivalent of a cat toying with a mouse, and that is very uncomfortable to read.

This is Oshimi, so there's a good chance that the discomfort is precisely what we're meant to feel. But the meanness is difficult to take, especially since Kei is going out of his way to torture Yo specifically. He's got a prurient interest in Yo's masturbation habits (and has, since middle school) and he's very keen on using Yo and Yui against each other, aware that Yui liked him back in the day and that Yo currently likes Yui, and has since middle school. Why he's doing this is unclear, unless we attribute it to retaliation that Yo stopped being his friend. But even that doesn't seem to be the sum total of Kei's motivation.

Kei isn't doing any real favors when it comes to depictions of LGBTQIA+ people. He's an amalgamation of plenty of harmful tropes, most notably that queer people are sexual predators. While Oshimi's art is quite nice and his stated purpose behind the story is a good one, the execution of the book is uncomfortable in all the wrong ways. There are plenty of good LGBTQIA+ manga out there. I'd suggest reading one of them instead.

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Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

Welcome Back, Alice is a very intimate story, with a tone very similar to Shūzō Oshimi's previous and better-known work, The Flowers of Evil. Yo is in love with his classmate Yui and experiences his first sexual fantasies because of her. His classmate Kei encourages this, but Yo catches Yui kissing Kei. Kei leaves for Hokkaido, only returning when Yo and Yui are in high school... with the added revelation that Kei is now non-binary and dresses like a woman. Yui and Yo are forced into examining their own sexuality as Kei continues to egg on their sexual curiosity.

Welcome Back, Alice handles a lot of darker subjects when it comes to sexuality and growth: frustration, confusion, resentment, and how all of that can continue to fuel our sexual desires. But there's also freedom, courtesy of Kei and how they refuse to conform to the gender binary. Where Yo struggles to appeal to Yui, Yui nevertheless struggles to appeal to Kei. Kei, for their part, feels like a complicated character, at once forcing their friends to grow while also challenging their still-solidifying understanding of how sex works and how it relates to who they are. While the subject matter may not be for everyone, this is still a very masterful story—wherever these kids grow, it's going to be a trip.