From the back cover:
Sudou Mikuzu has a very special talent—she can see ghosts. And because of this predisposition, she’s become a magnet for all sorts of unwelcome monsters. Luckily for her she’s just met Seto, a friendly, cross-dressing young exorcist. Sudou needs protection from all the creepy phantoms bugging her, and Seto needs to practice his exorcism skills. Consequently, the pair decides to team up and help each other. In return, Sudou promises to bake a cake every time a ghost gets zapped!
Review:
There are many good things about Heaven’s Will, but one profoundly disappointing one that I suspect was not actually the will of the mangaka.
This is the story of Mikuzu Sudou, a girl with the habit of fleeing from things that frighten her. What frightens her? Anything she can’t understand, which includes ghosts and boys. One day, while fleeing from the clutches of a creepy stalker, she seeks refuge in a house that her classmates regard as being haunted. There she meets the lovely cross-dressing Seto, whom she initially takes for a girl, and his vampire companion, Kagari. Seto offers to dispel the spirits, or oni, that are bothering her and though he originally wants to charge a hefty fee, settles for payment in daily cakes.
Throughout the course of the story, Mikuzu works on her tendency to run away from things and actively tries to understand strange things as well as face up to them. Seto, who doesn’t frighten her due to his cute appearance, gives encouragement but also works as a subject, since Mikuzu wants to know more about him, even though he seems very strange. When she learns that Seto plans to give his body over to the spirit of the sister who died on his account, she works hard to dissuade him and refuses to be distracted by the silly case of a haunted piano. Kagari also has rather sad reasons for hanging around Seto, which Mikuzu does her best to understand, as well.
There are a couple of little things that bugged me—the part with Mikuzu’s stalker wraps up awfully abruptly and though in the short story that spawned the truncated series she says there’s no one she can tell about her ghost-seeing abilities she later has some random anonymous friend who’s forwarding clients in need of exorcism to her. (Mikuzu has agreed to serve as bait for oni so that Seto can profit by exorcising them.) Also, the part where the spirit of Seto’s sister appears is kind of random. On the positive side, I really like Takamiya’s art. It’s clean, pretty, and very expressive.
Although I think Takamiya does a good job with Mikuzu’s development, the story is unfortunately limited to one volume and doesn’t go any further. The final chapter is moderately satisfying, with Mikuzu hopeful and resolved to keep Seto from essentially killing himself on his sister’s behalf, but I really wanted more. In her author’s notes, Takamiya says, “Unfortunately, it ended without me being able to even do half of what I had planned.” And that’s a real shame. I could’ve happily read about these characters for quite a while.
Review copy provided by the publisher.
I think you felt about this a lot like I did. Really nice art, cool potential as a story, but really suffers from not being able to be fully developed.
I wholeheartedly agree with your review! 🙂
Y’know, I’ve certainly been frustrated before when things ended abruptly, but most of the time when I’ve encountered that, the work hasn’t been so good anyway. I’m really kind of surprised that this got curtailed, because it had such potential.
You know, by that point she might have written herself into so many corners, it mightn’t have worked anyway, it’s hard to tell. I think she’s still not *quite* sure how to tell a story as big as the one she had going here. But it’s hard to know for sure. I really look forward to seeing more of her work, though.