Review by Frank Plowright

From Children of the Sea’s beginning Daisuke Igarashi has been building toward an immense event. At first this was slow, but with Children of the Sea 4 an awful lot happened between chapters of flashbacks, not all of it immediately comprehensible. From the beginning Ruka has instinctively felt a connection to two strange children Sora and Umi, and as far as can be ascertained, Ruka has been left with the spark for a universal force of change within her.

More so than previously, where it wasn’t in short supply, Igarashi portrays the diversity and wonder of marine life. Beneath the seas there’s a greater awareness that change is coming, and all sorts of species are in a headlong rush. There’s an absolute joy in the way Igarashi draws the assorted species, and the abstractions he sometimes constructs from them.

Much of this volume is told without words, merging reality with the broad streak of mystic realism the series has always carried. For all the emphasis on scientific fact in earlier volumes, here Igarashi just has the unknown wash over readers with Ruka as the viewpoint. Readers see what she sees, and just as it’s up to her to make sense of what she experiences it’s up to readers to make sense of what they see. Igarashi’s illustrations show what we believe to be impossible, yet here it happens. If that makes this concluding volume sound ambiguous, well that’s the case to a degree, but deliberately calculated to be so. Anyone who loves the look of the series in black and white is also recommended to try the colour animation.

The ending is as enigmatic as much of what’s happened earlier. Has the world changed? It doesn’t seem so, yet perhaps the overall message is that change begins with a single person.