Review by Frank Plowright

Children of the Sea is a story told over five volumes almost entirely in flashback, opening with a middle-aged woman and young child in a boat. She’s Ruka, subsequently seen as a young girl hanging around the aquarium where her father works, having been banished there for the summer after an angry incident playing handball. There she meets friendly young boy Umi, and later his slightly older and more distant brother Sora who were found orphaned in the Philippine seas and are believed to have been raised by dugongs, Asian aquatic mammals similar to the American manatee. Whether true or not, they have an affinity for the water, and can’t remain out of it for extended periods.

Daisuke Igarashi takes an extremely leisurely approach to Children of the Sea. Introducing his cast and their circumstances occupies almost all of this opening volume, and even the excellent art can’t disguise this is slow going. We learn it’s not just marine events the brothers are attuned to, and they remark that Ruka smells like them, without offering any greater detail.

An extremely long two hundred pages elapse before arriving at the staging point of all main characters having witnessed what they call The Ghost of the Sea, a fish that turned into light before disappearing. By then only two chapters remain, and Igarashi begins moving the plot forward.

Readers who appreciate a serenity to events might find Children of the Sea holds greater appeal. There’s certainly no shortage of beautifully drawn underwater scenes. Igarashi’s talent for evoking luminescence in black and white is startling, and when assorted rare fish appear late in the volume much care is taken.

By the end a number of matters casually mentioned to begin with have coalesced into a plot and there’s mystery to carry readers into Children of the Sea 2.