December 31, 2022
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A good, surprisingly atmospheric one-shot
Isagi-Kojima follows 戸田裕司 (とだ・ゆうじ) an honors student tired of his life who's still haunted by a childhood accident; one day at school he runs into an estranged childhood friend of his, いっちゃん, and the two gradually begin to reconnect. The premise is fairly simple, but I thought the execution was really well done in terms of showing 裕司 and いっちゃん's differing (but strangely compatible) worldviews. 裕司's inner thoughts and monologues are often broken over several lines, and the art style and atmosphere give the whole work a rather gloomy edge to it, leading to a rather subdued feeling throughout the work.
I've been slowly re-reading through this author's earlier works, and it's always so much fun to see how her art improves and moves towards her current-day style. Isagi-Kojima is her most polished work so far of her three early one-shot releases, which is really impressive considering it takes some authors books and books and books to show much change and/or improvement in their style.
Vocabulary is nothing special; school and daily life vocab are pretty much the bulk of it. Grammar probably isn't really going to go above N3, but there's a whole bunch of word shortening and slurring common to high school students. It can sometimes be difficult to keep track of the thread of 裕司's thoughts as well, due to them sometimes be broken over a page or two.
Interestingly, the original '96 physical release has full furigana, while the '23 digital release does not. The digital release includes all the color artwork ever released for the story, as well as a new two-page oneshot at the very end. It's pretty interesting to see the changes in the artist's style over an almost 30-year gap.