ウスズミの果て 1

Story

Atmospheric story of a girl who rummages through the rubbles of human civilization after the outbreak of a deadly epidemic, seemingly brought by mysterious monsters, in the search of remaining human life.

The beginning of the first volume is particularly light on text, favoring a more visually-driven narrative to introduce you to the world. However, the text density picks up after that, as she meets various robots, previously working for humans, during her exploration of the various districts of the city.

By interacting with those robots, she gets to learn more about the history of the place, and gradually we discover the various events that transpired and what life post-apocalypse is like. We see how those robots continue to faithfully carry out their tasks, in a world where one can rightfully wonder “what's the point?”

The story has a bit of bleak, and pensive tone with stints of hope, and an aura of mystery. What I personally disliked is that the chapters felt a little too episodic and could use a bit more action, but the contents of the 2nd volume hint at the development of a more concrete plot-line, so I'm curious to see what the author will come up in volume 3 (and later?).

Language

This is a good opportunity to practice your keigo comprehension and your katakana recognition skills. Depending on how sophisticated their speech synthesis engine is, computers/robots will either speak in hiragana+kanji or in katakana+kanji.

Furigana is very rare, and the vocabulary can go beyond the boundaries of typical daily-life stuff but it is quite restricted in scope and gets reused very frequently.

While reading, I didn't come across idioms, yojijukugo, cultural references, or onomatopoeia (unless you count the SFX), which I typically find challenging personally.

The writing is also very low in slangy-grammar and all characters so far speak without a dialect or weird speaking quirks (aside from the robot voice and keigo).

Occasionally, the scenes contain text (e.g. road signs, computer screens, ...) that is written in a heavily stylized font that is sometimes even degraded, which can be hard to read for learners and OCR engines alike.

Stumbled across this manga the other day, read the free preview, and instantly knew I had to read it. And once I started reading, I couldn't put it down.

It's a post-apocalyptic story following the story of a girl searching a destroyed city for survivors of a calamity (結晶病 "crystal disease") and disposing of the bodies of those who didn't make it. It's quite a bleak story, and as a content warning there is suicide and some body horror throughout.

It isn't a very text-dense read, especially for the first few chapters, but the vocabulary required is definitely not at a beginner level. Luckily, a lot of the more difficult vocab is core to the story so it was repeated throughout. The grammar wasn't too complicated, although there were some more formal speech patterns in some places.