天空侵犯 1

A fun mashup of The Backrooms and Die Hard. This girl Yuri finds herself in an alternate dimension that seems to consist solely of skyscrapers, bridges, and strange masked killers, and a few other normies seem to be in her same predicament. I really like the setting, it's pure liminal goodness, you've got recognizable and developed civic infrastructure, but almost completely devoid of humans. That's vaporwavey. Feels a bit like Exit 8 but on a broader scale. Yuri is aware of the isekai trope so I do wonder if there will be a worthwhile explanation of the world or if it's just a weird alternate universe that exists "because isekai". It's easy to start a compelling mystery but ending one in a satisfying way can be quite tricky. We'll see, but for now it's an enjoyably mysterious and compelling world. The artwork is fantastic with an incredible sense of architectural detail and some truly vertigo-inducing angles. There hasn't been much breathing room to flesh out Yuri herself, but she seems like a driven and determined character.

The vocab and grammar are all pretty simple and yet this has some good sentences structures that I understand in Japanese but wouldn't directly translate well into English. I liked that I could make sense of a sentence that boils down to "Me and my brother won't become someone's 'just as planned'". It's clunky in English but it reads super well and sounds cool in Japanese. I like reading stuff that's easy to understand like that but still would be tricky to translate, it feels a little special. The way she just says "いや" a lot is punchy and to the point, but if you we're doing it in English it'd start to feel clunky writing "I don't like this" or "no good" over and over. It's stuff like this that makes you appreciate getting to read something in its native tongue because that's the best place this kind of dialogue can actually work.

Really good first book.

Easy read, there is a lot of repeat dialogue. No dialects, simple to follow story. The final 3 chapters had quite a lot more dialogue in which I had to look up things, but still following simple structure and grammar.

Recommend for anyone looking to get into manga.