Tsubasa Ichinose was once an ordinary boy on vacation with his family, up until the point where they all developed amnesia after a car accident. They all know their names, where they live, and their relationships, but that’s it. This is the core mystery at the heart of “The Ichinose Family’s Deadly Sins”.
Or so it seems.
As Tsubasa and his family assimilate back into their daily lives and dig deeper into the incident that erased their memories, the darker and more sinister things become. Tsubasa himself was once bullied, but then got a swelled head from soccer and became a bully himself. His little sister had a secret life of going out on “compensated dates”. His father cheated on his mother, to the point where his other family even has a kid. And his grandmother is hiding an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
It’s a very cerebral brand of horror that you don’t often see gracing the pages of Jump. And it just seems to keep going, to the point where, if you haven’t been paying serious attention, it might be hard to keep track of.
(I know it has been for me. I think there was a mention of time-loops of some sort? The memories do reset over and over again, a la Higurashi, I know that for a fact.)
But there are sinister forces afoot as well, forces that don’t want the Ichinose family to remember everything.
Original concept aside, the simplistic art style helps to make the darker aspects of the story stand out even more. Tsubasa makes a perfect simple-minded, wide-eyed, idealistic protagonist, which, again, helps to make the darker aspects of his mysterious past stand out even more.
What also helps is that (at least at this point) everything seems to be grounded in reality. The lack of supernatural elements really helps hammer home to the reader the very realistic fear that “hey, this could possibly happen to you!” The series also plays on the old fear of “realizing that the people that you thought you knew are really not who you think you are”. And “even you might not be who you think you are”.
Because, without our memories and our thoughts and our individual identities, who are we? We all like to think that we know ourselves, and that our core personalities won’t change. But what if they do? What if everything we thought we knew about ourselves, or those we love, is wrong?
That is terrifying. (And no-I will not say “mortifying” like so many other people nowadays do, because I am 100% sure that’s not how you use that word.)
The Ichinose Family’s Deadly Sins is still ongoing in the pages of Shonen Jump, and I read the translations every Sunday on their website. No word, as far as I know, of any anime releases or English releases, but one can only hope.
I just know that I’ll keep following this series until it either ends or else becomes too intricate for me to understand.
Whichever comes first.
And, with that, we are all free to enjoy the rest of 2023!
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