いぬやしき

INUYASHIKI

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
10
RELEASE
July 25, 2017
CHAPTERS
85

DESCRIPTION

Ichiro Inuyashiki is down on his luck. While only 58 years old, his geriatric looks often have him written off as a pathetic old man by the world around him and he's constantly ignored and disrespected by his family despite all that he's done to support them. On top of everything else, his doctor has revealed that he has cancer and it appears that he has little time left in this world. But just when it seems things couldn't get any worse, a blinding light in the night sky strikes the earth where Ichiro stands. He later wakes up to find himself unscathed, but he soon starts to notice that there's something…different about himself.

(Source: Crunchyroll)

CAST

Hiro Shishigami
Ichirou Inuyashiki
Daitouryou
Hanako
Naoyuki Andou
Mari Inuyashiki
Shion Watanabe
Fumino Inoue
Satoru Hamada
Marie Inuyashiki
Takeshi Inuyashiki
Nakao
Yuuko Shishigami

CHAPTERS

RELATED TO INUYASHIKI

ANIME ActionInuyashiki

REVIEWS

FunkySpider
70/100
Better than average manga, but slowly gets less interesting.
Writing a review for Inuyashiki is hard because my feelings for the story have warped so much since the days I first began reading it a few years ago. It starts out so strong and ends up spiraling out of control midway focusing too much on what I essentially consider "despair porn" chapters and moments.

What drew me into this series was the idea of an elderly protagonist. It's rare in manga to see something like this, as many writers tend to gravitate towards highschool students to try and appeal to their target demographic. Instead what we got was a fascinating view of the life of a humble, modest man nearing the end of his life, and how he copes with protecting his family and dealing with the idea of having new alien robotic abilities. Through his actions we see him question what it means to be truly human or alive. Coming to the aid of innocent people in order to feel any sense of life and to convince himself that even after the accident, he still has a human conscience.

Another character in Inuyashiki begins to undo the niceties of our protagonist in chapters I previously described as just being despair porn. The story begins to focus less on what it means to be alive and the introspective of personal morality, and more about how many innocent people can we show being brutally murdered to try and nail in the fact this guy is a bad dude. I wont mention the characters name due to spoilers but it's frustrating to see an actually interesting character being overshadowed by another generic highschool student who listened to one too many linkin park albums.

The artist Hiroya Oku has a very distinct and expressive art style to his work. However a lot of his backgrounds tend to look like photographs he just filtered to look drawn. Apparently this is a style unique to him and some are okay with it. I however thought at times it looked very jarring. It also took a lot of the enjoyment out of double panel pages.

Overall I would give this a soft recommendation. If you're like me desperately trying to filter your way through the piles of generic cookie cutter manga then I wont lie and say this is what you've been looking for. But the chapters that revolved around Inuyashiki were always a good read. It's a shame this manga ended on such a dull predictable note, but there's definitely some chapters I'd consider a 9/10 near the start.
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Recess247
70/100
Inuyashiki is a good manga and a nice reading experience, but it has its flaws as the plot progress.
Inuyashiki is the second manga I read from Hiroya Oku and my expectations were... well, not too big. But once I started with it, I remembered why I fell in love with Gantz (arguably Oku's best work). It has some of the key elements from Gantz like alien technology, the sensation of agitation while reading, identity crisis, etc., but the story acquires such a distinct concept that escapes the "it's a copy!" argument.

What I appreciate the most is the exploration of power and morals of the main characters once they realize that their lives have changed. It seems to me that this topic is also present in Gantz but is not the focus of the story. Power is introduced as the alien technology that makes up the bodies of the protagonists, which gives them superhuman abilities, and it’s the responsible of funding multiples ideas of dichotomy: the good and the evil, the young and the elder, the foolish and the wise, etc. Therefore, we have a traditional fight of good and evil, but not too spectacular. How their interests collide is not the main plot of the story, but rather the development of Shishigami Hiro as a character.

To me, Shishigami is the best of the story: an adolescent who forgets humanity as he becomes an alien killing machine but struggles to be a killer and keep his relatives safe. While this is cool and all, the story of Ichiro is not of my interest; sure, I like how he is able to save people, but the construction of his family as ungrateful and ashamed on the first chapters is forgotten by a majority of the manga, only to be solved by “wow, our father is almighty”.

Now, regarding my “sensation of agitation while reading”, it is a feeling that I had while reading Gantz and felt it again with Inuyashiki, apparently it is a watermark from the author. But how does this even happen? By the rapid succession of panels that do not have dialogues in them and only show movement, action, pain or fear. While I do not recall this as great panel design, I do recognize its effectivity while reading. When you are immersed in the reading you would notice this design and fly across the pages of the chapters.

The identity crisis is another topic that I liked a lot, because it explores how memory shape our identity instead of our material bodies. It might not be the greatest exposition of this topic, but I like how Oku plays with it again in this manga.

The city where the story unfolds is good but not too ground-breaking, the design it’s mostly pale. The inhabitants of the cities are your usual doses of nihilistic people that Oku employed on Gantz, you know, to make it more "realistic". They do not add much to the story, but certainly they remind you how boring would be if you started a conversation with one of them.

Inuyashiki is a good manga and a nice reading experience, it has its peaks as a science fiction manga, but it tends to be weak in its story. Shishigami Hiro is the best developed character, suppressing Ichiro’s development and goals. I love how this reminds me the time when I read Gantz, so, if you are a fan of Gantz, I encourage you to give it a chance to this one.
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XON1
45/100
Understanding un-understood
Understanding

I loved Ichirou Inuyashiki. Despite only being in his late fifties, his struggles with the rest of the world, even his own family, disregarding him as a weak old man felt all too real. Even if his initial story only spanned over a single 54 page chapter, it was almost like we could understand him for much longer, and it made his gaining of new abilities feel that much more deserved. All of the events on his side, up until the fight, were enjoyable and emotionally enthralling. My only critique here is it felt wrong to make these real issues act as a villain of the week for Inuyashiki in the way they're set up to be cast aside as soon as they were solved, but it's a minor critique.

The art serves its purpose well. The backgrounds are decent, though I'm not a fan of how frequent there's clear photographs scanned in at times due to how jarring and distracting it can look. The characters stand out the most to me artistically, their facial expressions always worked perfectly for the emotions portrayed, especially those of fear. The most interesting thing stylistically about this manga's art is easily how negative space is used to create an evil look on Shishigami's and sometimes Inuyashiki's face. It's used sparingly, and felt right for every moment it was a part of.

Any lore behind the aliens, how their technology works, or why their craft fell to Earth being left unexplained was a good call. An explanation there was left out intentionally so the reader can simply interpret our two main characters' new bodies as godlike compared to Earth's abilities. What I can't excuse leaving unexplained was the reason behind Shishigami being at the park at the time the craft hit. Having these coincidences where it just so happens a good hearted man and bad hearted man are the ones to luckily gain supernatural powers is fine, but Shishigami should've been given as solid a reason for being at that park as Inuyashiki.

The uses of online forums and social media served as a great outlet to show how the public thought, as people tend to censor their thoughts less online due to the anonymity provided. Its part in the story was a welcomed touch.

Hiro Shishigami

Shishigami is a mismanaged character; his kills would be justifiable narratively if they were meant to be impulsive due to his highly reactionary nature, but it’s also portrayed as him continually feeding into a sunk cost.

His first kills shown were on the family of his friend Andou's bully, which was made to be more of an excuse for him to kill someone and please his psychopathic desires, as Andou wasn't keen on his idea, and these desires weren't really made his goal past

It’s not unrealistic for someone to want to kill for this reason, but if this is supposed to be the villain of our story I would hope there to be something solid or consistent for me to get a hold of.

There's a telling moment around the middle of this story where after Shishigami begins to do good deeds using his powers, only by healing other citizens in need, to appease his friend Watanabe that took him in. Soon after this stroke of goodwill, a SWAT team raids Watanabe's living place to kill Shishigami for his crimes, and collaterally, Watanabe and her grandma for being complicit. He runs away with the dead Watanabe and grandma in his arms and is able to heal both back to life with his abilities. After this, he retaliates with a massacre on a police station. This is a good example of his impulsive and reactionary nature, and Shishigami himself confirms this in a dialogue with one of the last detectives in the station, but he later says the following in a flashback during his fight with Inuyashiki after Shishigami began gunning down the people of Japan:

Now Shishigami feels like he must kill masses of the Japanese population daily - not because it makes him feel alive, but because he has to - and the idea of a sunk cost is further justified by his thinking he can compensate by healing the same amount of people.

This switch between killing because he wants to and because he has to isn't made very clear at this point, nor is any reasoning behind it, and the fact that we aren't at all shown how the police still going after him, after he tried healing people, affected him attributes to a lack of care for showing how this character feels. It could be argued that how he felt about it is implied by his reaction of killing dozens of innocent people in the streets after he cleared a police station, but I feel as though he would have led himself to that point regardless of how authority tried to stop him. If he truly felt that it didn't matter how many people he healed and that the police would be after him anyways, why would he bring the idea up to Watanabe again? Of course he doesn't want to heal these people, and only brought it up as he thought it would appease her, but it's more a matter of Shishigami's logic. If Watanabe allowed this, which Shishigami would find to be ideal as he wouldn't have brought it up otherwise, then Shishigami would be killing and healing random innocents over and over. I find it contradictory to what's supposed to be his reaction to a SWAT team paying him a visit after he healed so many people.

These problems could be solved if Shishigami's motives were clarified. If the villain's gonna be a cold-hearted murderer that kills out of bloodlust, stick with it. The whole reason Inuyashiki works as a character you can care about with barely any reasoning or backstory explained is that concept of wanting to help people, despite actual ability, is something relatable and human, so when he feels joy after one of his deeds we can be joyful with him. Shishigami is hardly human or relatable as unfortunately some of us readers aren't psychopaths, and it's impossible for this to be intentional as he's made to be someone who strictly cares about his friends and family - which is human, but it's fully juxtaposed with the supposed joy he finds in killing others, which is made to be absent in the later parts.

These qualms nullify the impact of Shishigami's threat of killing masses of faceless citizens daily, and makes his act of making planes rain seem more tasteless if anything.

Un-understood

The fight between Inuyashiki and Shishigami is a failure for the most part. There's absolutely no tension in the moment they meet, and quite literally only fight because they're good guy and bad guy (which they of course make glaringly obvious in dialogue). After that hollow conversation, it divulges into a chase sequence where they both eventually wind up in the air, where Shishigami knocks out Inuyashiki. It triggers his automatic homing rocket system, which knocks out Inuyashiki. The rest of the fight becomes two automatically manned carcasses flying around the air trying to evade each others' homing rockets. Inuyashiki's carcass beats Shishigami's carcass out by getting a hold on him from behind, tearing his limbs off mid air. Paced too fast overall, and just not very interesting with a lack of setting in the end (unless you count the satellite), and a lack of character throughout.

US President Donald J. Trump appears on a TV to tell the world an asteroid is coming to exterminate all life on Earth and, as any president would, calls for a worldwide purge where all crime is legal. Not another alien craft, just an asteroid. Inuyashiki flies up to stop the asteroid, but to no avail as his attempts to use his carcass rockets are only chipping away at the absolute mass of the asteroid. Shishigami appears, and says he needs Inuyashiki to push his eyes in to self destruct. Thankfully, this ability has never been mentioned or developed before this point, so the mangaka can make this explosion as big or as small as he wants. He chose to make it big enough to where Inuyashiki's self destruct would wipe out what Shishigami's explosion left. So, we're left with a forcedly bittersweet tragedy.

In the end, Shishigami and Inuyashiki's valiant actions just don't matter as we are shown only the family and friends of the two are made aware, the general populace have no idea what really happened, and everything is back to normal.

Did anyone learn anything or grow from this? Not really, I guess it helped the son muster up the will to fight back against some bullies, and we're shown Inuyashiki's daughter Mari won a contest to get her one-shot manga into Jump, which had no correlation to Inuyashiki's deeds.

It thematically lost what the first parts of this manga had, how caring for others in an age of apathy and high technology can be fulfilling in a way nothing else can replicate has become a message of not giving a shit about anyone else and staying in your own lane. I believe this is the case as we're shown Mari, the most selfish character of the manga who strives to be a great mangaka for fame and fortune, will succeed as a mangaka to be revered by public that won’t recall Inuyashiki. Another nod to this, Mari's one-shot is titled "Alone", as if it's a symbol conveying isolation to chase your own dreams is more successful and therefore likely to make you happier than helping others and getting help yourself. I'm not opposed to this message ideologically, it's an overtly deliberately safe note to end on for what was built up in this manga.

Like the world did in the final chapter, let's forget about Inuyashiki.
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