Makoto Ozaki made the choice to live. Now he has to live with it.
Happiness
Part 1 of 3
by Shuzo Oshimi
Kodansha Comics
September 2016
A vampire is loose. Makoto Ozaki is a young high school student who goes out one night to get a movie and ends up getting attacked by the vampire. She gives him the choice to live like she lives or to die. He chooses life. The rest of the manga is about Ozaki’s evolution into a vampire.
Previously bullied, now Ozaki fights back and accidentally finds himself in a position of power. He also finds that food isn’t satisfying. In fact, he finds a strong pull towards blood. As relationships change – that’s the main point of this story – and he grows we find a completely different Ozaki than we start with. But there is quite a bit of information that is hidden and surely to be revealed in the coming books. For instance, the cover has the female vampire that converts Ozaki but we see her only twice and we learn nothing about her. If my description of this story was all it was I’d be interested to see how it goes. But it doesn’t.
My main issues are with the unnecessary mature parts of the story. The mature rating of this book is due to the violence (in the vampire scenes) and also the sexuality. In one uncomfortable scene Ozaki masturbates to a PC monitor, taking time to pull down his pants and face the monitor. Fortunately we don’t see anything else. There is also where he get’s the smell of blood from while at school – clearly from girls who are on their periods. I found these distractions to be more young teenager fantasies than good storytelling.
The art is well done, exciting and conveys the story very well.
There are other parts to this story but I’ll not be reading them. The story barely gets going in volume 1 and the extra material don’t excite me.
Scott Asher is the Editor-in-Chief of BookGateway.com. His personal blog is AshertopiA – a land flowing with milk and honey… and a lot of sticky people where he turns real life into stupid cartoons, writes on Christianity, Zombies, and whatever else he wants and posts Bible studies from his classes at church.
This book was provided by the publisher as a review copy.