Remember when MPD-Psycho was a relatively straightforward police procedural? Those days seem to be long gone.
Creative Staff
Writer/Artist: Sho-u Tajima and Eiji Otsuka
Translation: Kuvar Subravasmanian
Adaptation: Kuvar Subravasmanian
What They Say
Our conflicted "multiple personality detective" Kazuhiko Amamiya, controlled by his murderous Shinji Nishizono personality, finds himself on a hijacked airplane, along with innocent Miwa and her schoolmates. Meanwhile, their hunt for the missing Amamiya leads Machi and bumbling police detective Sasayama to an ocean liner commandeered by several new, bizarre characters - key figures in both the twisted "barcoded eye conspiracy" and the deadly Gakuso Society! Step onto this crazy ride, as even more strange deviants are introduced and writer Eiji Otsuka continues to astound with his inventive plot twists and atrocities.
The Review!
MPD-Psycho can be an extremely frustrating series to review on a volume-by-volume basis, mainly because Otsuku likes to organize the series in a way that makes it really hard to tell what the hell just happened until several more volumes down the line. The series's seventh volume is a glowing example of this phenomenon, shuffling rapidly among several loosely-connected plot threads in either a vain attempt to explain what's going on or a deliberate effort to utterly confuse the reader. Given what's gone on in the series so far, I'd say either is equally likely.
Of all the things being set up in this volume, the easiest to follow -- and that's not saying much -- is Gakuso's goal, which has been hinted at in earlier volumes but is now made explicit. Several of the story's key players are carrying around complementary fragments of personalities in their brains which they're trying to combine into a complete replica of Lucy Monostone's personality, thought it's difficult to follow exactly which combination of Kazuhiko Amamiya, Shinji Nishizono, and Miwa Isono's XX personality will accomplish what. Best I can tell, then end goal is to get all three together, and so we have Nishizono/Amamiya trying to complement with XX onboard the hijacked plane (or vice versa) while in parallel the original Amamiya on the Gakuso ship is trying to forcibly complement with Tetora's copy of Nishizono. And to bring all the various parts together, Nishizono/Amamiya plans to crash the plane into Gakuso's boat.
Got that?
Oh, and the man with the mask-like face from last volume (who goes by "Candyman" here) has some kind of stake in the Lucy Monostone project combined with a conservative shadow government that's been secretly running the country behind the curtains. Plus, we've still got Kitou running around the Philipines and talking about some mysterious "man from the phone", whom the editorial notes promise we'll find out more about in future volumes.
As you can probably tell, this is another entry in the series that tries its best to defy description, much less a letter grade. At this point, the best I can do is throw up my hands and have some faith that Otsuka is going to make some sense out of this mess later; it wouldn't be the first time he's made the plot virtually impossible to understand and then brought it back to semi-sanity again later, and I doubt it'll be the last.
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