Review by Ian Keogh

Kazushige Sanda is fourteen, and as Sanda opens he’s being chased around the school classroom by Shiori Fuyumura, a fellow pupil with a knife. When interrupted by a teacher she mutters that she’ll kill him before the day is out. Being an idiot, Sanda figures she fancies him.

The promise of murder apart, the classroom scene is relatively conventional, so it’s not immediately apparent that Sanda is set in a future where Christmas has long been abolished. What Fuyumara has somehow discovered is that Sanda is a family name disguising an old curse, and under the right circumstances Santa Claus re-emerges.

While Paru Itagaki reconstitutes Santa Claus as an action hero, it’s not a concept to be taken seriously, and he undermines any thoughts of that via illustrations of Santa always being in underpants, the way Sanda can transform back to his familiar body and the basic premise. That’s Fuyumara believing Santa can find her missing friend, whom everyone else believes has died. However, as Santa is Sanda in an older body she may be reaching too high.

Were that not the circumstances, as seen from the first panel in which she appears, Fuyumara seems clinically unhinged. She has absolute faith in Santa to the extent of a succession of murderous plots to ensure his appearance. Whimsical doesn’t begin to describe what’s going on.

Itagaki’s art is stylised and exaggerated to feature a lot of angry looking people, the exception being Sanda as a school kid, who’s almost someone with ‘victim’ tattooed across their forehead. Santa himself is a definite brute, given sharper features and an air of danger, and there’s a great design for Fuyumara, with hair lacquered into eccentricity.

It’s not until halfway through this opening volume that Itagaki offers a background to Japan in 2080. The birth rate has dipped to the point where only a tiny percentage of the population are of school age, meaning children are really treasured. After that the third main character is introduced, as seen on the sample art. They’re a dorm mate of Sanda’s who’s observed the truth and wants to take advantage.

The outright wackiness of Sanda means it’s not going to be to all tastes, but it proved successful enough in Japan to fill sixteen volumes and prompt an anime version. By the end Sanda’s realised a lot of what Santa can do is a form of super power, and his continuing learning process takes us into Sanda 2.