tl;dr: A pretty good thriller with a mixed bag in terms of characters and a pretty annoying ending. “Would you kill someone for 5 million yen? What if they were a murderer?” This manga is the story of the protagonist, Shiki, getting pulled into being a hitman in order to pay for his sister’s medical bills. Shiki is just a substitute teacher, but his partner in crime, Kazumi, is an experienced police officer who doesn’t care about the money but rather seems to be taking part solely to vent his feeling regarding evildoers. With the targets being bad people and a skilled cop helping out itmay seem like things won’t be that difficult, but murder is always complicated, both physically and psychologically.

This manga is pretty well written in terms of being a thriller. The murders themselves generally aren’t that complicated. The plans are incredibly simple and straightforward to carry out. What makes things interesting is the complications that occur during the plans and how they’re dealt with in the aftermath. What’s suspenseful isn’t the crimes, but the coverups. Shiki and Kazumi are doing their best to stay under the radar of the police, mainly the detective pair Hosaka and Itou, and this results in a cat and mouse game. Kazumi being a police detective makes hiding considerably easier, but they still have to thread the needle pretty often. It’s definitely a page turner.

It’s also well written in fleshing out many of the key characters. Shiki goes through very complex development, wherein he’s incredibly unsure about what he’s doing from beginning to end but feels he has to go through with it anyway. His thought process and motivations are conveyed incredibly clearly so it’s really easy to sympathize with him and get invested in him and his goal. Hosaka is also fleshed out well as he goes through his own character arc, as is another major character, Ei, who is the best friend of one of Shiki’s victims. The three ultimately have a very complex relationship, despite the pair essentially being a criminal, a police officer, and a victim. The dynamic is very unique and handled surprisingly well.

Unfortunately, a lot of characters are also pretty badly written. The most prominent example would probably be Kazumi. He doesn’t really get fleshed out at all. His motivations are never really explained either. There are a lot of small hints regarding what could be driving him, such as him seeming to have a very negative opinion regarding his coworker having a family, but nothing is made clear. The mysterious atmosphere works well with him to a point, but I feel there should have been some explanation eventually. There’s also Utaka, who is a minor character who could easily have been taken out of the story with essentially nothing important changing. Though what little presence she has is anger inducing so I strongly question why she was included in the first place.

The most bizarrely badly written character was Itsuki. Despite being the main heroine, she’s really just… not. She seems like a key character early on due to her having a supernatural power that could be really helpful. However, early on it’s only used for things that it isn’t really all that necessary for. And when the plot proceeds in a direction where her power actually could have a major impact on the way things progress, she mysteriously loses it. An explanation for where she got her power and why she lost is given, but it’s done so quickly and casually that the only reason I’m taking it seriously is that no other explanation was provided. She doesn’t really do much in terms of things not involving her power either, nor does she have a character arc. She felt kind of like a mascot character that was there just to keep the atmosphere from getting too dreary. She has some romantic development with Shiki, but it isn’t fleshed out all that well and overall was pretty dissatisfying.

The ending I have complicated feelings on. The final stretch of the manga definitely gets much messier and is rushed. However, I feel that worked well in conveying the feeling of everything quickly falling apart. The ending also certainly isn’t exactly happy, but I kind of feel that it became incredibly obvious pretty early on that for a lot of the cast a perfectly happy ending was impossible, so that didn’t faze me too much. For the most part, I think the manga did a decent job at hitting the notes it wanted to regarding its core themes. These themes are incredibly simplistic, essentially just the morals ‘killing is bad’ and ‘what goes around comes around’. But the way things flow, with both of these feeling incredibly obvious early on, being mostly heavily muddled in the hustle and bustle of things, only to be once again be openly in your face in the ending I think was handled well.

The biggest problem I have with the ending is how much it leaves unexplained. An epilogue that elaborated on what happens afterwards I think could have helped considerably. As it is, I think it intentionally leaves things ambiguous while leaving hints that suggest a final twist that significantly sours me on the ending. I feel it doesn’t really fit at all with the themes I previously mentioned. And while I wasn’t expecting a happy ending, I was hoping for the happiest ending possible, and I feel like this was trending strongly towards that only for it to be pulled away at the last minute. The fact that this is done subtly only makes it worse because while logically I really can’t see it as just a coincidence, emotionally I just want to ignore it.

The art is decent enough in terms of style and quality. Character designs are solid enough considering the setting. There’s a lot of symbolism like the Furies and Shiki’s box cutter, but most aren’t used very well. The exception to that is showing certain character’s seeing or interacting with dead characters in order to help convey character’s mental states to the reader, which was pretty intense.