The Drifting Classroom: Volume One
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Class is in Session

I have horror on the brain these days, which is kind of whacked.  All around me are signs of spring and heavy drinking, but I'm checking over my shoulder for vampires, werewolves and giant bugs from Hell. 

I already know I'm good at quaffing beer, but I'm not good at digesting horror.  I didn't run screaming from the theatre while watching Ghostbusters as a four-year-old, but neither have I ever truly enjoyed watching things splatter across the movie screen, whether it be blood from a corpse or the Coke hurled by the little snot-nosed punk in the front row.  But while I make a conscious effort to avoid horror movies, books and manga are another matter entirely.  I'm fatally addicted to reading.  Fatal.  Aa ha ha ha.  Put a three-thousand page novel or the back of a cereal box in my hands, and it's gone in a second.  Especially if there's cereal inside the box. 

A couple of days ago, Viz sent me a mess of manga, including more of Kazuo Umezu's Drifting Classroom.  I've touched briefly on why I love this series so much, but I've never gotten into the gory details.  It is a horror series, make no mistake (and Umezu, the mastermind behind Baptism of Blood, is no stranger to the darker bits of the mind), but it's not a traditional horror.  There are a few shambling Frankenstein monsters jumping out from between the pages, but Umezu mostly touches on those fears we don't think about until insomnia catches us staring at our ceiling at three a.m. Insanity. Separation. Death. And worst of all: Loneliness. 

Torments 

Readers have different opinions on horror "masters" like Stephen King.  More specifically, some love his work while others believe he should fester and die in pit of tar and blood.  I lean more towards the former camp.  It's not King's descriptions of blood-sucking monsters that scare me; its his victimization of nice, normal people.  Ben from 'Salem's Lot, David from The Mist, Stu Redman from The Stand … they're all average blokes who are violently separated from their lives and loved ones through no fault of their own.  Umezu uses the same emotional play very heavily in The Drifting Classroom.  Sho is a grade six student who attends school as usual--and suddenly, inexplicably, the entire building is teleported thousands of years into the future, where Tokyo is buried under a wasteland of rocks and sand.  Too add impact to the situation, he has a nasty fight with his mother the morning before the incident.  Separated by millennia, mother and son think of their last, terrible words to each other, and agonise over the apologies they never had a chance to share. 

Lord of the Classroom 

The Drifting Classroom is based very heavily on The Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  But while Lord of the Flies had its creepy moments, it was more a study on mankind's tendency to cling to his dark side. 

Umezu does rely a little heavier than Golding on the "Boo" aspect of horror as opposed to trips into the human psyche.  Sometimes, however, he combines the two and achieves some truly twisted results.  In Lord of the Flies, a dark enemy lurks, some sort of devil amplified tenfold by the jungle dark and the paranoid minds of the children.  The Drifting Classroom does present a nemesis, one that's (almost) as clear as the day: A giant centipede who's very real, but also dreadfully unreal.  A centipede is not a nice-looking insect to begin with; a giant, immortal centipede is a vision you can do without when you close your eyes at night.

The "leader" of the children in the Lord of the Flies, a blonde-haired boy named Ralph, stresses a point to the outcast children over and over: The absence of adults on their island makes it vitally important for everyone to act like adults and be responsible for each other.  In an interesting contrast, several teachers and other school staff are teleported to the wasteland along with the children in The Drifting Classroom, and their breakdown is swift.  They manage to maintain order at first, even as it slowly dawns on them there is no water, food, telephones or radio.  What finally breaks most of the teachers is an eerie, unworldly eclipse that comes with the "dawn" of the second day.  One teacher commits suicide, a cafeteria worker beats the children mercilessly for any scraps of candy or chocolate they have in their bags and pockets, and one favoured teacher even kills most of the other adults and several children before he's stopped with a knife to the throat. 

Sho, who is The Drifting Classroom's answer to Ralph, tells his peers the teachers likely broke down because adults are used to an orderly, rational world with an explanation for every phenomenon.  Yet, the students slowly begin to go insane as well, some even going as far as to sacrifice the school bully in hopes of coaxing rain out of whatever god they believe is watching them. 

Blackboard Jungle 

The Drifting Classroom does have its flaws.  Sho and his closest peers drive the story forward, but they often act too adult to evoke sympathy and suspense.  Ralph's pantheon of friends often failed to act like adults as they'd promised, which had some sad consequences. But Sho rarely fails to pull a solution to a problem from his head.  Ralph also neglected the youngest children on the island, who were the most tormented by visions of the "Beast" stalking them.  Sho, however, is protective of the youngest children in the school.  He's a noble lead character, but the start of the manga outlined him as a flawed, often selfish, boy.  Umezu could have retained some of those characteristics to vary Sho as a leader. 

Regardless, The Drifting Classroom, while a little dated, is an excellent series.  It sacrifices a bit of its psychological horror for the sake of some more tangible scares, but on the other hand, you really can't deny that giant centipede is one creepy son of a bitch.