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Review – Ikigami

A child is full of potential.  That’s partly why we cherish them so much.  In Ikigami: the Ultimate Limit, the government has developed a vaccine that can protect the population from every single known disease.   However, to keep the citizens appreciation for life, a small percentage of vaccines kill the child before he or she turns 25.  A day before their death, a man delivers an ikigami or death card to the victim.  Fujimoto delivers these cards.  Unfortunately, Ikigami is a lot like a child just full of potential.  It never grows into anything more.

I would be willing to accept that a government would do this except it seems so pointless.  People can still die of random acts.  Also, generally, an appreciation for life comes with age.  So killing children and young adults might hurt the families of those children but I would think that the surviving population would only feel relief that they had survived, not necessarily a new appreciation for life.  Having the vaccine kill-switch triggered between 25 and 40 makes more sense.  However, the book does focus on the devastation the ikigami brings to the families so I guess I’ll try and move past this nagging plot point.

Fujimoto begins to question the practice but has to be careful because the big bad government kills anyone who questions them.  Of course they do.  In volume 1, Fujimoto delivers an ikigami to a bitter loser who promptly goes off the deep end and extracts revenge on his highschool tormentors.  The story is designed to show the potential problems with alerting someone to their death; they’ve got nothing to lose.  However, the overblown artwork makes it seem like the man was a psycho and it was only a matter of time before he went off anyway.  In fact, his advice to a young child is ‘go off now, don’t wait’.  Confusing.

In the second story a street musician duo is separated when one is tapped for stardom and the other isn’t.  The would-be star receives an ikigami and decides to reconnect, in his last seconds, with his true soul.  He sings a song the duo wrote and that song brings his friend out of a coma. Then Fujimoto begins to wonder if the ikigami isn’t such a bad thing but a gift that allows people to really live.

There’s a lot of unnecessary information about how the vaccine is made and how it’s recipients are kept secret.  This extraneous information illustrates what’s wrong with Ikigami.  There’s too much thought.  Instead of being a story about human experience and limits of life, it becomes a commentary on government, crime, art, and duty.  That’s too much.  The artwork is also overdone.  At times the characters look like they are in a Pokemon battle as opposed to dealing with a revelation (albeit an awful one).  Tears pour over dramatically, veins bulge.  These conventions don’t heighten the tension, they just take the reader out of the story.

I can see the potential in Ikigami because it’s not a bad idea.  The format of a big story tied together by stort stories leaves the door open for lots of different emotions and themes.  Unfortunately, nothing comes together in any tangible way.  It’s not a bad but it’s certainly not good.  Oh, and another nagging point that maybe someone can help me figure out.  On the first page it says the elementary school is in Angleton, Texas yet all the children and teachers are Japanese.  What’s the deal?  Is this something that was changed for Western readers?  If so, why?

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