tl;dr: A manga that’s awful in most regards but hilariously nonsensical in being so and thus worth the short amount of time it’d take to read. Bone Collection is rated really low, and while I certainly wouldn’t call the manga great, especially as it clearly got axed and rushed into a forced ending, I had fun with it. The central premise of the manga is the protagonist, Kazami, using what’s known as the Youkai spell to channel the powers of the super high class youkai Paira, in order to fight other youkai. There’s also some romance between Kazami and Paira and some general themes about coexistenceand getting along. None of that is really all that good however.

Paira is a Gashadokuro type youkai, a skeleton type youkai, though she takes the form of just a regular human. Her goal is to make this form her true form and just become a regular human, but in order for her to become human, she needs to lose the power in each one of her bones. Kazami uses the power of a specific bone of hers every time he uses the Youkai Spell and afterwards the bone loses power. Furthermore, each bone manifests as a different weapon or ability. I think the issues here are obvious. The protagonist has a wide variety of abilities, but can only use each ability once. As such there can be no depth to the combat because every fight will be full of things suddenly brought out that have never been seen before and will never be seen again. I think this would have worked a lot better if the manga didn’t focus on combat but instead using the abilities to deal with other issues. However, this clearly is a manga that was trying to turn into the standard shounen battle manga and thus as it continues to develop in that direction it gets weaker and weaker.

The romance is pretty weak too. Paira falls in love with Kazami immediately basically due to him not treating youkai any different from humans and professes that love very strongly. Kazami just brushes her off though for pretty much the entire manga, and that just makes him look really lame. I think the plan was that it was going to tie their relationship development to how powerful their abilities are, but the manga ends before it gets much chance to do so. But even then, even if the mangaka was determined to keep the relationship stagnate until plot events progressed it, it could have been written much better. The themes about coexistence between human youkai also fall kind of flat because it doesn’t do proper world building regarding the state of youkai in the world and their relationships with humans, and thus any changes in that regard don’t really land.

Why then did I enjoy the manga? Because it’s hilarious in the most unexpected of ways. I’ve read a lot of manga and tend to find most pretty predictable to a degree, not just in terms of the plot but also what kind of jokes they’ll try to make and such. However, this manga had things that were totally out there happening constantly. It has a very unique sense of humor that I haven’t seen in other manga. The jokes and twists are all utterly stupid, but they had me genuinely laughing at how bizarre they were. If the manga went on longer I have a feeling that the novelty of this absurdity would run out and it would cease to enjoyable whatsoever. However, the manga only went on two volumes and ended before this happened, and thus I felt those two volumes were worth reading.

I do wish the art was better though. The art in general is really amateurish in terms of quality and style. Designs of both humans and youkai are pretty weak too. The manga is listed as ecchi and it does decent at that when it tries, but it’s so rare that it isn’t really a boon to the manga at all.