Review by Karl Verhoven

It’s been five years since Asa last saw the monster she believes has kidnapped her family. Sightings in intervening years have been few, but as of the end of Volume 4 she and Keiichi are flying directly at it at night and over the sea. The resulting situation plays out piecemeal throughout the book, but Naoki Urasawa has several other plots in motion, all occurring on the same night with the opening ceremony of the 1964 Olympic Games due to take place the following day. A monster rampaging through Tokyo would certainly broadcast the wrong impression, but Keiichi has his former professor’s papers, and if he can only decipher them there’s a note of the monster’s weakness.

A different form of desperation is being experienced by Asa’s friend Yone, too naive to realise how sleazy the person she believes to be a show business producer is. Except now the yen is beginning to drop. And that’s not accounting for the third problem, perhaps the most serious of all, as no-one knows Asa’s other friend Miyako has been abducted. “There’s no danger to Asa. She’ll come home safe and sound” is a wildly hopeful prediction unless the creepy government agent is more than he seems.

This volume is a masterclass in telling a story. In addition to the meticulous art, Urasawa switches from one scene to the next, each providing an adrenaline rush, yet every time the jolt to the next scene is a frustration. It’s astonishingly tense throughout, and yet there’s time for Urasawa to introduce a new batch of characters. Stunning. You should head straight to Volume 6.