外天楼

Detective Stories in a Robot-filled Future

For Mature Readers

This manga is set in a future where robots are commonplace and society struggles to balance the issues of robot rights with human's freedom to pursue darker passions and the pursuit of knowledge no matter the cost. The story is told through seemingly unrelated characters and episodic mysteries that eventually come together by the end. While the story starts light, with a trio of teenage boys on a quest to acquire dirty magazines, and at points is even laugh-out-loud funny, the tone gets darker and more mature as it goes on. The ending pages especially pack a real emotional punch.

The manga does not provide furigana for most kanji, and includes vocab related to police/detective work, futuristic technology, political debates, and even one character who spoke with a rural dialect. Especially the police slang was interesting to learn! At times the mysteries were so peculiar, and the details described so precisely it was hard to follow the reasoning if you glossed over an important line or misread a sentence, but it was much easier to follow on a second readthrough.