Review by Frank Plowright

Lead character Ganta Igarashi has discovered he has powers related to blood. Extremely deadly powers. But he’s not the only one within the Deadman Wonderland facility to be so afflicted, and the day after his previous one on one contest, seen in Deadman Wonderland 2, he’s scheduled for another.

It’s a clever set-up on Jinsei Kataoka’s part, and one she’ll sucker most readers with as they think they’re reading a rare quiet and sympathetic sequence. Even better is the way what’s set up ties in with a character who’s been seen as determined, but whose place in the scheme of things hasn’t previously been obvious. In a series where much has been unsettling, some moments in the first two chapters might be the most disturbing yet. It’s a psychological twisting of the knife rather than violence, but it’ll provoke a reaction.

The series is set in the future sometime after a devastating earthquake. Until now that’s been largely irrelevant other than a means of setting up a dystopian society, but here Kataoka begins to use it as a means of showing how it defines who some of the cast became. That includes Shiro, who remembers Ganta, but until now he’s had no memory of her. It comes flooding back as there’s another terrifying revelation about Shiro.

There’s less action in this volume, but the plot still moves rapidly forward, and Kazuma Kondou delivers the revelations with as much skill as any combat. The viewpoints are varied, and the cast wear their emotional scars.

A new factor is added to the ongoing events in the final chapter. The prison’s director has been seen to be power-crazed and corrupt, but it turns out that there are some within the system working at something bigger than just earning points to stay alive. A show of good faith proves surprising, and the series heads into Deadman Wonderland 4.

Kataoka always manages to stay several steps ahead of anyone predicting what’s going to happen, and that makes for a thrilling series.