Review by Karl Verhoven
Thomas has a dead end accounting job in a factory manufacturing lifelike sex dolls, one of his few comforts being using the factory models. He has one at home, causing his mother to believe he has a girlfriend with all the embarrassing questions that prompts. He’s also been intimidated into embezzling money for his boss, so his life lurches from one crisis to the next.
Is there any way out short of killing himself? Well, there is Live Memorium. It’s described as “an illegal ‘machine’ that plunges you into hypnosis where you relive your childhood memories. Except you are conscious and in full control of your actions, so you can change the course of events”. Using it the first time gives readers an explanation for Thomas’ friend Usaji, never seen without a head-covering helmet.
Miki Makasu spends a long time establishing just what a pitiful life Thomas leads, and it’s drawn in mind-numbing detail by Benoit Bourget. How much? Well, there’s detail and there’s Bourget. It’s there in the backgrounds of the sample art, but give Bourget part of a city to draw and he’ll supply every window frame and doorbell. Every rivet on machine is visible and even when there’s an opportunity to slacken off a little, the couch pattern on the sample page is still complicated. At times it’s just too much.
When we go back into Thomas’ past it’s even more depressing than his adult life, but on his first trip back he’s able to make a crucial change, and gradually the confidence accrued from rectifying his past impacts on his present.
It provides the title, but Live Memorium is merely a maguffin enabling a character study and raising questions about all of us. It’s known how childhood experiences form a person, yet could implanting false memories with better outcomes affect the present? Makasu plays this out intelligently, asking whether we’re just naturally who we are and that will always prevail in the end, or whether meaningful change can be made. Alternately darkly comedic and emotionally brutal, Live Memorium is a page-turner from start to end.
