Content Warning: Domestic abuse, suicide, bullying
Boy’s Abyss by Ryo Minenami is a manga that fascinates me with how far what it wants to be is separated from what it actually is. Minenami is clearly trying to craft a serious narrative with high stakes and drama about very dark subject matter, but the execution is widely off mark. Due to profoundly bad pacing, an insistence to tell not show, and some gag inducing dialogue; this tragic story about human darkness instead becomes unintentionally hilarious. While none of the cast are exempt from these issues, our lead boy is patient zero for everything wrong with this manga.
Reiji Kurose is a seemingly normal high school student who’s life happens to be overwhelmingly bleak. His grandmother has dementia, his brother is an abusive shut-in, his mother is overworked and checked out, he’s the gofer for his childhood classmate turned bully, he can’t get out of the small town he hates, and on, and on, and on. Any of those challenges are fine in isolation, or even bundled together, for communicating to the audience how much of a bummer it is to be Reiji. The problem is that none of Reiji’s issues are given a moment to breathe before the next one is introduced to the reader. By the time he is caught with his literal dick out after a one night stand with a local convenience store worker, I was already howling with laughter. Within the first volume, Boy’s Abyss turns into a bizarre game of Trauma Bingo where you try to guess what horrible shit will happen to Reiji next. This all comes down to a seemingly fundamental misunderstanding of how to use tragedy as a storytelling device.
Aristotle and Anno…
Tragedy is a fickle thing. It relies on a paradoxical relationship to bring the audience pleasure and catharsis through the suffering of a main character. To quote a philosopher I think was wrong about most things, but on to something here, “Tragedy is, then, an enactment of a deed that is important and complete, […] it is enacted, not merely recited, and through pity and fear it effects relief to such and similar emotions.”1Aristotle (1932). “Poetics”. Aristotle in 23 Volumes. Vol. 23. Translated by Fyfe, W.H. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. A classical example of this would be Hamlet. A weeb example would be Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Controversial opinion: I hate every single member of the cast in Neon Genesis. They’re all terrible people and I’d love nothing more than to slap them all with a rolled up newspaper. Misato has her daddy issues, Askua has her mommy issues, Shinji is an incel with daddy issues, and Director Ikari is a dick. However, this is not a negative. You are meant to despise the cast of Neon Genesis and their pitiful, tragic lives. They flatly reject any efforts towards real communication and choose to isolate themselves to avoid hurting others and being hurt in turn. This isolation leads them into further paranoia and anxiety, creating a vicious cycle where they close themselves off further. Most of the adversity the cast faces could be overcome by simply being honest with each other about how they feel. The robots are a fun temporary solution, but you can’t really murder your way to understanding someone else.
When witnessing this trauma and refusal to change, the audience sees their own psyche reflected. If Shinji would just stop being a misogynist, and masturbating over the girl he put into a coma, then he could actually form a real connection with another person. We see that, and we so desperately want him to change, while being forced to confront the terrible decisions we’ve made in our own relationships. It’s in this confrontation that the audience finds their catharsis. We pity Shinji and are released from our own.
We get to know the cast in a way that’s pretty uncommon for most anime and I’d argue this is a big reason why Eva has remained so pre-dominant in the zeitgeist. It works in Neon Genesis because each character has nuance, there’s more to them than just their baggage. They get the occasional victory and they even come so close to bridging that gap; only for the narrative to push them further apart. Critically, we’re forced to watch them breakdown in real time and the show is paced in such a way that both the characters and audience have to hold that. The tragedy in Eva isn’t effective because there’s a lot of it, it’s effective because it has restraint. Boy’s Abyss on the other hand, wouldn’t recognize restraint if it was wearing a name tag.
The math of tragedy…
It was co-creator of The Tonight Show Steven Allen who famously had the following to say about entertainment in 1957, “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.”21957 February, Cosmopolitan, Volume 142, Steve Allen’s Almanac by Steve Allen I feel that Allen was definitely onto something here, especially as it pertains to real life. You likely aren’t going to be receptive to jokes about a traumatic event until sufficient enough time has passed for you to process it. It’s the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 as I write this and the “Never Forget” shit-posts have become as much a tradition as the remembrance itself. I don’t find that to be crass or insulting, even if the jokes don’t land, because it means we’ve successfully made it to the other side of trauma. Having said that, I think there is another formula for how tragedy can become comedy that is unique to fiction:
Tragedy multiplied by Tragedy minus Time equals Comedy
When this formula is used intentionally, the result is black comedy. Media like Trainspotting or Oyasumi Punpun. Someone like Tatsuki Fujimoto is an expert at this form of comedy as it’s present in all of his works. When applied correctly, you get classics like Chainsaw Man. When used poorly, you get something like Boy’s Abyss.
Earlier in this post I included a list of Reiji’s current baggage and you might be thinking that those reveals are spread throughout the volume. You would be wrong as everything I listed is from the first chapter and that list is actually incomplete. The series is a non-stop dogpile on Reiji for the 400+ pages I have read at the time of writing. He gets no relief and everyone in his life is using him, with the possible exception of his mom (once) for about two pages. I’m sure it must be difficult for Reiji to play the hand that life has dealt him but as a reader, it is very funny to watch the absurd lengths that the author goes to make Reiji’s life miserable. The result is that Reiji is without a purpose or agency in what is supposed to be his story.
Reiji has no nuance as a character, he is simply an empty vessel to be filled with SadTM at Ryo Minenami’s behest. The rare glimpses we get of his internal world reveal a shitty misogynist like Shinji minus any of the latter’s complexity. The part where he condescends to a woman he’s about to have sex with by telling her, “I want to see the real you” almost broke all my teeth through pure cringe. Ultimately, I don’t feel any pity or fear for Reiji because this manga isn’t interested in waiting for me to feel anything.
Boy’s Abyss is a massive failure of intent. In trying to create a story with maximum drama, Minenami has instead made something comical. I can’t recommend it to anyone that would like to see these issues taken seriously but it is a trainwreck that I won’t be able to stop watching any time soon.