We all want to get on the ground floor, but that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, we find ourselves walking into a movie two reels in, munching popcorn and whispering to each other “And who is that guy?” In honor of those confused moments in all of our lives, this week Manga Friday read Book Two in a short stack of manga series, and tried to figure out what the heck was going on.

First off is Spiral: The Bounds of Reasoning. The division into volumes is a bit odd here, since the first section of Vol. 2 is the third and final part of a locked-room mystery. So we get that old-fashioned mystery-plot staple: the detective explaining everything and talking at great length to all of the characters, who wonder why he’s gathered them all there. It’s very talky, of course – that’s the whole point of that kind of exercise – but it summarizes the first two parts of this particular story well enough for me to understand the ending.

After that are two one-part stories and then a two-parter, which explain a bit more about the premise, and expand out the cast a bit. The detective from the first story is a teenager named Ayumu Narumi, and he’s the other stereotyped manga teen boy: the uber-competent whiz kid (as opposed to the amiable slacker – no manga teens that I’ve seen are just pretty good at a couple of things). He’s both a deductive genius and a world-class pianist, but is tortured because he’s not as good at either of those things as his older brother, who disappeared mysteriously (swell ominous music).

The antagonists are a group called the Blade Children; we don’t learn all that much about them in this book, but they all are missing one rib (surgically removed in early childhood), are even more tormented than Ayumu (and linked to him and/or his brother somehow), and possibly have some kind of secret over-arching plan. Two major Blade Children are introduced in this book: Eyes Rutherford, the goth-y English teenage piano sensation (the world within a manga is a deeply silly place, sometimes, full of people named “Eyes”), and the sneaky, monologuing Kousuke Asazuki. I’m not entirely sure if they’re supposed to be villains, per se, which might explain why they’re not terribly frightening – or comprehensible. All in all, I could follow the main plot of Spiral, but the first volume might have explained the point of it all in a way that I really needed. (more…)