Ko’s friend Mahiru goes to Anko, the detective who killed a starving vampire, to rat out Ko’s activities. Mahiru, however, is already deeper in this mess than he realizes. And while Nazuna and Ko are learning to be honest, Ko’s gotten a whole other kind of offer from Hakka…
Dream and reality once again slam into one another this volume as Ko starts to learn that being a vampire might not be all it’s cracked up to be. Even with such minor downsides as ‘need to drink blood to live’, there’s a lot more to consider here than he first thought.
As he says, the night is freedom to Ko - it’s where he escapes from the world he had to inhabit before and feels most comfortable. But will that same feeling hold true when he is fully a creature of the night? It’s once more the idea of what you like becoming your whole life to the point that you might resent it.
Surprisingly, it’s Nazuna who has the answer to that question, fully admitting that a lot of her good mood has been borne from showing off for Ko and she’s actually been bored for decades on end. Of course, that leaves a door open that two might be better entertained than one, based on that notion…
And that delightfully complicated relationship is the heart and soul of this book. Ko doesn’t get love and Nazuna, big thank you to the book for pointing this out since I like a story with some awareness, acts like a locker room conversation as a defence to try and keep anybody from getting closer.
Except it isn’t working and watching them end up drawn together, at times despite themselves, has been so satisfying. The visit to Ko’s bedroom is absolutely hilarious - Nazuna is in peak form here - and the ending of that section is quite the thing. And it just keeps topping itself - if anything, Ko is more emotionally mature and he brings that out in Nazuna.
And the surrounding material is so good. Despite her eyebrow raising proclivities towards younger “men”, Anko is a villain, but only from one perspective. From another it’s quite obvious how she sees her work as important and, simultaneously, how much of a threat it is to the vampire community. Sometimes you need a moustache twirler of a villain, but this sort of story about what your humanity means at the end of it all is better served with a little nuance.
Ko does a lot of soul searching, but his encounter with Hakka, another vampire, is something else. Hakka’s lifestyle is a whole thing and Ko gets an offer wrapped up in all sorts of warning bells, to say nothing of the telegraphed but wonderfully done reveal that trades in being horribly shocked for a kind of acceptance and decency that I would never have expected here. This might be the best part of the book.
We get a little more plot development on Mahiru as well, who is well-meaning with regards to Ko, but is also kind of an idiot who’s playing around with things he doesn’t understand and his lack of experience and savvy leaves him in a real lurch by the time the story wraps up.
The way the book juggles all these plot lines and still manages to be sweet, creepy, fun., silly, romantic, and thoughtful at various times is something else. It is one of the most consistent books I’m reading and it is the best shonen series in my pile right now, hands down (Spy x Family is super close though).
5 stars - to me, this is a perfect manga. I really don’t have a bad thing to say about it - okay, maybe not every romantic pairing should have massive age gaps - and it might not be the most philosophical thing ever, but it’s damn good entertainment.