Kaori Yuki is writing a story of manipulation and control at the highest orders of the universe, with levels of misdirection and false fronts as complicated as you would expect from a parliament of ageless angels. At the bottom of it all is Setsuna, a boy inhabited by an Angel at the top of it all, and he’s determined to cut through the entirety of this Gordian Knot of a conspiracy with his plucky good nature and some kind words. All so he can get back to sleeping with his sister.
By Kaori Yuki
Setsuna Mudo is a mixed-up high school student who has gotten on the wrong side of God. He is the reincarnation of an angel who has rebelled against heaven. Now the Angels want him dead, the demons want him to lead the revolution, and he just wants a clue to how the world works.With just seven days to find his beloved sister Sara in the afterlife, Setsuna goes to hell, only to find himself sitting in judgment of the very angel who condemned his soul to life after life of suffering. But the only way out of the pit is through it, and how much time can Setsuna waste on revenge? Meanwhile Heaven is falling apart as assassins move in to murder God’s highest ranking angels! Will there be a universe left when-and if-Setsuna gets out?
Books five and six lean heavily into the themes of control: The Earth-bound angels and their human hosts, the fibrous robot doll over Kato, Uriel by his own mask, Rosiel and half the people around her, and Zaphikel controlling Sara to control Setsuna to control Alexiel.
I complained about the art in my first review, but I have to say that it has gotten one hundred percent better since then. Yuki embraces confusing and widely varied layouts, and I love it. She’s developed a special expertise with shading and screentones and letting them run into each other and overlap and combine and depart.
Yuki also has fun with thought bubbles. Many are simply a shaded square, with the background shading roughly indicating the state of mind. It’s not uncommon to have four or five different styles of dialog balloons and boxes in a single page. It’s not always clear to read, it’s as correctly messy as five overlapping trains of thought and dialog should be.
There’s a great tradition in fanfic for the writer to “solve” all the wonderful conflicts of the source material with an author stand-in, who simply “talks it out.” Weirdly, that’s what Setsuna is here, Yuki created a vast world will a hundred interpersonal battles that make exciting, and then she created a too-damn-nice Setsuna to remove all of those struggles with an occasional monologue. Even when he’s being killed, he, quite kindly, understands the motivations of the killer and asks that they continue if it will make them feel better. I never thought I’d say this, but thank god for the incest, otherwise he’d be the blandest character in the story.
Yuki invents mythology almost on the fly. In a single page Yuki introduces positive and negative energy and ether waves, and then none of those are seen again. In another, the high angels are identified with the four elements. She treats all her pieces of world building like other authors treat side-characters: some are permanent, some are single-issue walk-ons.
One of Yuki’s more realistic myth-building actions is giving the angels a nearly random assortment of domains. Uriel is the tall angel of Earth, Death, Judgement, and the Flame of Hell (not to be confused with Michael the short angel of Fire). Too may authors approach world-building with a narrow of logic, where a god’s domains are closely linked and never overlapping. It’s a pet peeve of mine. Real mythology is full of gods and powers with arbitrary and unconnected domains like Mothers and Hunters, which can only be explained through history.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said about the law, “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” I’ve read similar things about language and grammar. And that same is true of mythology, it’s always been more historical than logical. Yuki is doing good work here.
Continued belowScattered thoughts:
- Why do all biblically inspired stories choose from such limited palette of influences: the book of Genesis, the heaven and hell and angels and devils from the early Christian church, and a smattering of Apocrypha? Jesus is only mentioned, the latter books of the Torah are never touched on, and if the Koran is ever included it’s only as a distant other.
- Kato is a favorite of Yuki’s, she mentions it in her side-journal (that gets a half-page in every issue). But he’s just a one-dimensional pop tart who only exists to die dramatically. Like an emo-mirror of Sara. And like Sarah, he, too, fridges himself.
- It’s never a good sign when the author says, “I’m not used to doing action scenes. It took up a lot of time. And the action isn’t that good.”
