The Fall 2019 Manga Guide

Discommunication

What's It About? 

Togawa isn't sure why, but she's in love with Mitsubue, the weirdest boy in class. She asks him out, and he agrees, but there's something very off about their relationship. Instead of wanting to do regular couple stuff, Mitsubue wants to clean her ears, listen to her eat pickles, and blindfold her all day so that the sunset is more impressive.

While opening her third eye so that she can get a good night's sleep is nice, Togawa still isn't quite sure what she's doing with Mitsubue – but she's determined to stay with him until she figures it all out.

Discommunication is written and illustrated by Riichi Ueshiba. J-Novel Club will release it digitally ($8.99) in November.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

If I had to say whether I liked or disliked this book, I'd have to go with the latter. Discommunication's first volume feels very much like it's being weird for weirdness' sake, and that can be very off-putting at times, especially when it comes to how Mitsubue treats Togawa. However, I also suspect that there might be at least a little bit more to the story's world than we're really seeing here, and that part of the draw of the manga is supposed to be the slow reveal of the truth about Mitsubue and his odd habits, strange collections, and especially the fact that he wears a fox mask much of the time.

If there is an underlying mythological element, however, it's going to need to show up very soon, because this volume is almost exhausting to read. The deliberate oddity that is Mitsubue mostly comes off as an attempt to play with Togawa's expectations of a relationship, and while that's an interesting device – especially since she was sleeping with her previous boyfriend in middle school and assumes that's how all relationships work – the sheer enormity of his strangeness becomes overwhelming. If he only collected religious artifacts or he only lived in an abandoned building or he only asked Togawa to let him do bizarre things, the point would have been gotten across just fine. As it stands, however, it smacks of attempts to do too many things and therefore none of them especially well.

Where this does stand out is the artwork, which is a fascinating combination of elaborate backgrounds, intricate details, and simple character designs that stepped out of the early 1990s. This really does make the point better than the story does, juxtaposing the everyday with the outlandish, and I actually wish there had been more color art included in the release, because it's even more fascinating than the black-and-white.

While I do appreciate what this book is trying to do, ultimately it doesn't quite work for me and the volume felt like a bit of a chore to get through. That's certainly not going to be the case for all readers, and the digital format may actually be a factor, as there was some eye-strain involved when trying to get all the details from the art, but at the end of the day, Discommunication is too deliberately weird to really bring its story home.