The Spring 2023 Manga Guide

Manner of Death

What's It About? 

When the skilled coroner Dr. Bunnakit is called to examine the body of his childhood friend after her “suicide,” he soon determines that she was actually murdered. That night, a mysterious stranger threatens him, telling him to rule her death a suicide-and after he confides in his prosecutor friend about this incident, his friend suddenly goes missing. But all hope is not lost, as a young lecturer named Tan offers to help him get to the bottom of all this-which would be more reassuring if Tan weren't the prime suspect...

Manner of Death has an original story by Sammon and art by Yukari Umemoto, with English translation by Emma Schumacker. This volume was retouched and lettered by DK. Yen Press will release the first volume on May 23.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Based on the Thai drama of the same name (which was apparently a novel first), Manner of Death is a soap opera disguised as a mystery. It seems to think it might be just a mystery at first, but it actually gets much stronger once it starts leaning into its soapier side – while the question of who killed Janejira and doesn't want Dr. Bunnakit to let anyone know is interesting, things get more involved once romantic interest Tan enters the picture. Tan claims to be Janejira's boyfriend, but when forensic specialist Bun shows up at the crime scene, he instantly smells a rat there. Tan becomes Bun's prime suspect, but before he can do anything about it, someone breaks into his house, threatens his life and those of people he cares about, and then slams his head against the floor. Shortly after Bun wakes up in the hospital, his best friend, a local prosecutor, is kidnapped.

Although it doesn't take a mystery buff to figure out that Tan is absolutely not telling Bun the entire truth, the story is still enjoyable. Bun and Tan's chemistry is evident from their first meeting, and it just heats up from there, although all sex scenes are in the fade-to-black format. (Still, some nice beefcake, if that's what you're into.) Bun knows that Tan is hiding something, but he's torn between wanting the truth and allowing himself to fall for the other man, which is complicated by the fact that he had a bad breakup and was bullied in school for being gay, causing him to retreat back into the closet. Tan just as clearly wants to come clean to Bun, but something is holding him back, and when we learn just what that is at the end of the volume, it's hard to blame him. To say that Tan's stuck between a rock and a hard place might be an understatement.

There's a strong flavor of instant love to the romance plot, which isn't always my favorite trope, and the men's attraction to each other, although believable, is a bit all over the place. Getting inside Tan's head in the second half definitely helps even things out, and everything is consensual, but this story excels in the tangle of plot threads more than in telling a linear, or fully coherent, story. It's still one worth picking up, though, more if you're a fan of drama (or possibly DRAMA by the end) than if you're looking for a new mystery, but with its polished art and soapy plot, Manner of Death is a lot of fun.

Christopher Farris

Rating:

Adaptations can be an opportunity to streamline or restructure elements of a story that might not have been strongest the first time around. A chance for a cross-medium second draft, as it were. Granted, what might be for the best is entirely subjective, and it could also be seen as insulting to the original author of a work if an adaptor took it upon themselves to make too many changes to what they were tasked with transforming. It's a push-and-pull that feels relevant to Manner of Death here, since while I'm not sure exactly how accurate Yukari Umemoto's manga is to the original novel by Sammon, this story still has all the earmarks of something that wasn't planned out all the way before they started writing it.

The core idea that kicks this one off isn't bad, at least. Bun's profession as a coroner could add some interesting details to him getting wrapped up in a murder-mystery conspiracy and needing to play detective. His closested gayness also adds the potential for further wrinkles, and that really comes to fruition about halfway through once the fireworks between him and Tan go off. That's easily the strongest part of the book, as breaking the seal between the two men results in some genuinely enjoyable chemistry between them, and Umemoto is pretty effective at drawing some cute dudes snogging. Unfortunately, that's only the middle of the story, with the beginning taken up by Bun just sort of meandering through the manifesting mystery, while the last stretch of this first volume is where it really swerves into that "making it up as they go along" territory.

There are some details that were definitely set up beforehand, but I can't say their exact payoff is what Sammon and/or Umemoto were planning for, or if they were simply laying out convenient writer's trapdoors. What we end up getting are details that are borderline unbelievable that Bun wouldn't have clocked from others before, revealed via vomitous flashbacks only to the reader. Whole stretches of the investigation plot from the middle of the story are rendered as nought but wild goose chases at this point, and not in the effective, red-herring way many other mysteries intend. Suddenly hidden feelings are being declared and a whole bunch of previously undisclosed siblings are coming out of the woodwork. Manner of Death isn't really able to spin this into a properly outrageous thrill-ride either, with most of the swerves coming off dissonant or exhausting. I was rooting for this one there for a second, but it's simply wound up with way too many parts, feeling like far less than the sum of them.