Another title in TOKYOPOP’s new Pop Fiction series for teens, Chain Mail seemed rather dull from the blurb on the back: “Four disillusioned Tokyo teenagers who have never met are suddenly drawn together by a mysterious chain mail message sent to their cell phones.” It sounded to me rather wispy, safely lying in the field of sickeningly sweet teen fiction. However, I soon became addicted to the story, driving me on to finish this book in two sittings (and that takes a lot for a lady with a young child).
The book opens with the unnamed narrator (who we can soon deduce as Sawako in the next chapter) talking about how her father always beat her mother when he saw her monthly grades and she wasn’t first in class, and how when she did finally score perfect, her mother had left the family by then. We then flash forward to Sawako attending her exclusive junior high school, where she is a social pariah by choice in the way that loner kids who are ignored by the other kids reassure themselves. Going to the washroom to check her email, Sawako finds an email from “Yukari,” who wants to create a fictional world, to play a play-by-post crime thriller role-playing game. The game has room for four players: the heroine/victim, the stalker, the heroine’s boyfriend/tutor, and the detective. Yukari has already taken the role of the stalker; Sawako picks the heroine. Leaving the washroom stall, she happens to meet Yuki, a notorious club-hopping girl, who accidentally leaves her cell phone in her stall…
The point of view then switches to the two girls who take the other two roles in the game, neither of whom know of “Yukari” or “Sawako,” the girl they receive their invitation from, and neither of the girls know each other. Mayumi, who plays the detective, is in reality the helper of her best friend Sayuri, a rising badminton star, who owes her ability to attend a prestigious junior high school to Sayuri’s insistence that she would only attend if Mayumi could go too. Mai, who takes the only open role of the tutor/boyfriend, is a club-hopper goth newly returned to Japan from New York who despises her idol-worshipping peers. All of the girls are introverts who find power within the world of Chain Mail, the role-playing game that the girls created. Everything goes well until reality catches up with them, as reports of a kidnapping of a junior high school girl show up in the newspapers, and mysteriously, Sawako stops posting… just as the stalker talks of kidnapping the heroine.
Chain Mail is definitely not for folks new to Tokyo geography and schoolgirl life. The editors supply some footnotes, but if you don’t realize small details such as the school year starting earlier in Japan, you will be missing out in the experience. However, it is incredibly fluid in switching between character perspectives, both the real people and their Chain Mail characters. Ishizaki does a great job of immersing the reader into the world of schoolgirl life, where social pettiness reigns high, and of revealing the mystery behind Sawako and Yukari through Mai’s investigations. He also allows the girls to grow and change, sometimes in positive ways, but also in negative ways as well. (I won’t get into details. Don’t want to spoil it!)
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