[DeepL Translation - needs review] Recommended by the Jury of the Manga Division of the Japan Media Arts Festival.
Alice wakes up in room 431 of a mysterious mansion. She disobeys the advice of the snake, which tells her that she must not leave the room, and heads for the exit, but her body gradually begins to rot... Can the girl escape from the cursed house? This is a sci-fi dark fantasy with a motif of "Alice in Wonderland," spun with unnervingly dense descriptions.
Selected for the Jury's...
A trippy visual experience
Bibliomania is a beautifully drawn horror manga that follows Alice's trip through the many guest rooms of a manor with a particular characteristic: all dreams of the guests come true as long as they don't leave their room.
However, unlike other guests who spend an eternity indulging in a totally fantastical world of their own making to the point of losing all touch with reality, Alice hates lies and promptly heads towards the only exit, located in room 000... To the cost of her body gradually rotting and morphing into an eldritch horror.
The plot is a bit confusing, lacking in some aspects, and I still don't understand what message the author wanted to convey exactly, but the main selling point of the manga is clearly the stunning art, interesting panel layouts, and crazy character designs. It feels different from the run-of-the-mill manga aimed at otakus.
Although visually-driven with many illustrations spanning the width of 2 pages, the narrative also has a surprising vocabulary breadth so I found myself doing more vocab look-ups than I would have expected but that's more for decorative words like 芳醇. The gist is expressed in somewhat straightforward grammar and writing style with the occasional kanji choice that warranted furigana even for a native 青年 audience.
If you're looking for a trippy visual experience without high standards on plot and character development — not that one can do much character development in the span of only ~300 pages anyway —, this little-known one-shot manga can be a treat.
Content Warning: nudity, bullying, suicide (both contained to a single room)