Let me start this review with a shameless (although shameful) quote: “Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not reallylooking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige".”

Every writer is, in some way, a magician. And exactly as in a great magic trick, a writer's prestige is the hardest, most important part of his writing. A beginning can be sloppy, a middle can be messy, but if the ending is done right, then it'll definitely leave a mark.

After months of wait, I finally got my hands on the fourth volume of Wakusei Closet, which to my surprise and despair, turned out to be the last. Wakusei became quite easily one of my favorite manga series of 2020, it was the setting, the characters, and the overall writing that made it perfect, and there was absolutely nothing I could not like on it.

In the beginning of this review, I quoted a passage of the movie "The Prestige" to talk about magic as a metaphor to writing. But, in a way, writing a mysterious, fantastical story such as Wakusei Closet is by itself an actual magic trick. You don't know what is coming, heck, you don't even know what's going on right now, but you're itching to know. You've been caught, you're the spectator watching fixedly as Tsubana does her amazing work, juggling a curious art style with a curious setting, you can't even blink!

You know something is up, you can feel it, the first and second acts are done, there comes the third act and you're jumping from your seat. But then something happens, something you didn't expect: for some reason, that third important act was not the point, the prestige is actually a fourth, additional act! That moment, Tsubana brings you behind the table and reveal to you all there is to that amazing trick, the bird didn't vanish and appear somewhere else, there are two birds and one is dead.

You don't have to be a magician, or a writer, to recognize that the ability to create such a trick is incredible, but as a spectator, you feel something is not right. You feel like the kid on the first row, crying out loud because the cute bird is dead. You wanted to be fooled.

Wakusei Closet takes you to a dream world scared by bad dreams, and at last, throws you into a world of nightmare and bittersweet reality. Where there's no feeling bad or good, but only "empty."

At the end of the fourth volume, our author thanks the reader and kindly suggests another reading, since that would bring a new light to the story just read. And that's the whole point of a "The Prestige" quote. The Prestige is a mystery movie at its core, it is a magic trick, and when you get to the metaphysical third act of it, its prestige, you feel exactly as a kid seeing soap bubbles for the first time, you just can't get enough of it. For Wakusei Closet, on the other side, at least for me, the first read is more than enough.

You don't really want to know.