tl;dr: A manga with a decent concept but one that doesn’t connect its various parts properly to the point it largely fails to hit the notes it needs to. This manga is about a group of eight friends that find themselves supernaturally trapped in their high school. They are completely cut off from the rest of the world and have no way to escape. The only hint they have regarding what’s going on is various supernatural phenomena centered around the suicide of a student two months ago. However, one of those phenomena is that all memories of who that student was have been erased, and thusthey have very little to work with. As such, the majority of the manga doesn’t actually take place in the present, but rather through flashbacks that explain each character’s background with the framing that they may be the student that committed suicide.

The manga goes through each character one by one and gives each an extended flashback centered around a major psychological burden. Each character is shown as facing a personal issue they need to overcome, the vast majority centered around their sense of self-worth. And while the writing does a decent job of conveying the character’s background and where the issues arose from to the degree that that alone is enough to empathize with and even like certain characters, it does a pretty bad job of actually doing anything with the issues such as showing the characters overcoming them or anything in that vein. As such, it’s hard to get invested in the cast at an individual level long term. Furthermore, the vast majority of these burdens are very isolated and have very little connection to anything else. The eight characters being a group of friends with strong bonds is a core aspect of this manga and one that is emphasized repeatedly. However, this is done very much in a tell but not show manner. The flashbacks do very little to establish the eight as a strong group of friends. The eight don’t really have much chemistry in the present either. Thus, it’s largely hard to get invested in the bonds between them, both at an overall group level or in the connections between individuals.

I believe that this was an intentional choice. This manga is a mystery in a sense in that it is heavily centered around discovering something that is unknown. However, it’s also not in that it’s clear that the mangaka didn’t want people to be able to predict where things would go. Far from providing clues, the writing seems to go out of its way to avoid foreshadowing as much as possible. And if that was their goal, I suppose they were very successful in that I was unable to predict the identity of who committed suicide, nor of another major twist, until it was made explicit in the final stretch. However, I don’t find that impressive as I usually do when twists surprise me, because going through the manga again with the ending in mind, while it’s true that there aren’t any inconsistencies, there was also essentially nothing that popped out as having a different meaning or being more important with the additional context. While the ending certainly doesn’t contradict anything, it also doesn’t really feel like it builds off of anything properly either. And thus, the ending in general doesn’t have much impact.

There were also some bizarre choices in world building, mainly in that it references Langoliers a lot. Langoliers are a phenomenon where a group of people are sucked into someone’s subconsciousness. As far as I can tell, this is a fictional concept created by Stephen King novel. However, in the world of the manga, it’s apparently a real thing that’s been well researched and that they can apparently find research papers about in their school library. That gives the phenomenon a weird tone that detracts from the atmosphere of mystery. And it doesn’t really feel like there was any point to it either as in the end the explanation of Langoliers given didn’t even really apply.

The art can look decent for backgrounds, but not so much with characters. There are multiple characters with similar designs so it’s hard to tell who’s who at times. Furthermore, the art style is bad with faces, with eyes that aren’t expressive and mouths that often have shading that makes them look bizarre. And even with the backgrounds, while it generally is decent, it never really looks all that great. There were also some strange translation choices with honorifics. The translation chooses to omit them, which I don’t mind in general if handled correctly. However, there’s a part in this manga where the usage of ‘-san’ is important, and the manga simply uses ‘miss’ instead which sound really unnatural and doesn’t convey the original meaning either.