Review by Karl Verhoven

There’s now a pattern established to the Asadora! volumes, with Naoki Urasawa using the opening colour pages to show scenes of the terrifying unknown monster at sea, while the remainder focuses on Asa’s day to day life. Given her piloting skills at seventeen it’s not an ordinary life, but neither is it monster infested. The recurrence reaches a peak with the opening to Volume 5.

Showing the monster at the start initiates Urasawa’s method of piling pressure on Asa. She saw the monster herself five years earlier, and in Volume 3 agreed she and her plane would be on standby for a government organisation to approach it at short notice when it was next sighted. Unfortunately, the call comes at exactly the time she has to pick up her younger siblings from school. Beside that her friend Yone insisting Asa accompany her to an audition becomes insignificant. Then Urasawa piles on further problems.

He accentuates a byegone era via those problems being largely of the sort to be resolved in an instant now via mobile phones, yet the cause of considerable concern in 1964. Also of concern then is how Japan would be viewed by the world with the opening of the Tokyo Olympics imminent, but this volume works wonderfully well for switching between comedy and danger, and not from the expected sources. Yone’s audition seems just a plot device to complicate Asa’s world, but Urasaswa continues to follow her, and it turns out the audition is going to complicate someone else’s life. Pretty well everyone in this volume is thrust into some kind of crisis, with only the government agents unconcerned, and they remain a sinister bunch.

Artistically Urasawa delivers Tokyo and the surrounding area in the midst of a storm so strong it’s possible the Olympic opening ceremony will have to be greatly scaled back. It’s bad for the cast, but supplies page after page of atmospheric art.

“They’re both shaking in their boots claiming a monster attacked them”, says a lighthouse keeper early in the book, little aware that what he considers a joke is the truth. Asa has volunteered for a mission and right at the very end we again see her flying her plane leading to a cliffhanger finale with danger imminent to kick off next time.