Hello again, manga fans. I was just down at my local bookstore again yesterday, and I saw that the final volume of No. 6 (or, as I like to call it, 200 pages of Ho-Yay) had released, so I thought I'd blog about it.
In the seemingly Utopian city of No. 6 (implying that there are at least five others out there), everyone follows the rules, everyone is happy, and there is no strife that anyone can see. Of course, us being as genre savvy as we are, we just know that this is not the case.
Four years before our story starts, a young boy named Shion (which is apparently now a unisex name) meets a mysterious outlaw named Rat. (Now, I know what you're thinking, and it used to confuse me too: his name in the original Japanese is Nezumi, which means "rat". A possible reason why they romanized it as Rat is that he is almost bonded with a series of small mice who do his bidding and send messages.)
In a sudden and blatant violation of the rules, Shion decides to harbor Rat by letting him in through the window. In the end, the jaded Rat leaves Shion with a few words to try and make him question his life before escaping.
Four years later, Shion encounters Rat again after he is blamed for a death involving a mysterious Progeria-like disease attack. And just when he had been named among the chosen future elites, too! It is soon revealed to us that the leaders of No. 6 are testing the disease by using a certain strain of bee to deliver it. Unfortunately, the bees cannot be used to target anything in particular.
(Also, these same bees are apparently injected into the heads of certain citizens early on as a sort of experiment in mind control. These bees seem to be what keeps most of the populace so docile. One diseased bee stings Shion, nearly costing him his life and changing his hair to the white that you see in the picture.)
Rat leads Shion to the outside world, where all citizens who live outside No. 6's walls are lying in squalor. When No. 6's officials can't find Shion, they take his childhood friend Safu (another weirdo name) as a captive. Shion and Rat, along with friends Dogkeeper, Rikiga and the city-bound rebel Yomin (they just keep coming) break into the high security prison (which is, for some reason, the true brain of the No. 6 system) to try and save her, but they are too late.
In the end, their resulting destruction of the prison not only permanently takes down the crooked No. 6 system, but also releases the "Spirit of the Forest" Elyurias, which No. 6 has apparently taken captive to try and control the aforementioned bees, who then proceeds to wreak havoc. Rat, being both an excellent singer and the last remaining survivor of Elyurias' "Forest People" who were slaughtered in her taking, is then conscripted to sing her a song of peace and save the day.
This series had a few holes in it and it took kind of a long time (relatively speaking), but it wasn't so bad. The dystopian atmosphere was a little cliched, but thankfully nowhere near as dark and sinister and monstrous as some others (The Capitol). It was more like The Giver, also in the fact that Shion and Rat's conflicting personality types place us heavily on the scale of optimism vs. pessimism, a thing you don't usually find in the kind of manga I read.
The manga's biggest draw was probably the amount of pure emotion and outright Ho Yay between Rat and Shion. They're both relatively attractive, they both care about each other yet aren't afraid to say what they really think, and they're complimentary in that "opposites attract" way. They even share a few kisses over the course of the story, although their is no out-and-out (if you'll pardon my unintentional pun) mention of their actually being gay for each other.
Although there is one scene early on where Safu asks Shion if he wants to try sexual intercourse, but he reacts like a typical nerdy boy who is just simply overwhelmed by her sudden statement. He doesn't exactly say no, but he doesn't say yes, either.
All in all, this manga wasn't too bad of a way to kill time, but there are many better works out there. I certainly couldn't see myself buying it, and I don't think I'll read it again any time soon.
Maybe once so much time has passed that I've forgotten how the story goes.
