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ホムンクルス [Homunculus] #12
Homunculus 12
Alors qu'il pensait en avoir fini avec les homonculus, Nakoshi decouvre qu'il ne s'agit en fait que du commencement... Mais pour aller plus loin, il va falloir prendre une decision irreversible et franchir un cap chirurgical majeur. Et qu'importe s'il doit faire cela seul !
224 pages, Paperback
First published February 27, 2010
7 people are currently reading
231 people want to read
About the author
Hideo Yamamoto
174 books248 followers 山本英夫 Yamamoto Hideo , is a Japanese manga artist best known for the manga series "Ichi the Killer" (which was adapted into a live-action film in 2001) and the series, Homunculus (manga).
Recurring themes in his manga are crime, sexual deviations, and psychology.
Recurring themes in his manga are crime, sexual deviations, and psychology.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
April 4, 2023
This volume is highly physically sensitive than the previous ones. I literally squirmed while tearing through pages. If it's possible to read with eyes closed, I'd do it.
Nakoshi's homunculus is open again, but the thing is, it's exclusively for a certain person. Not satisfied with this, the main character found ways to widen the scope of his homunculus once again with this mysterious character lurking around. Who is she in Nakoshi's life? We'll find out in the next volume.
There are some parts of the volume that lit up my face. It's Ito's freedom to express himself, topped with a couple of pictures to prove his father's acceptance of his queerness. I love that part, lol.
Nakoshi's homunculus is open again, but the thing is, it's exclusively for a certain person. Not satisfied with this, the main character found ways to widen the scope of his homunculus once again with this mysterious character lurking around. Who is she in Nakoshi's life? We'll find out in the next volume.
There are some parts of the volume that lit up my face. It's Ito's freedom to express himself, topped with a couple of pictures to prove his father's acceptance of his queerness. I love that part, lol.
June 26, 2022
Unfortunately, it all went sour from the Nanako arc. Everything becomes rushed near the end and falls flat. Manabu, one of the primary characters, gets reduced to a minor character, negating all of the fantastic character development..
September 17, 2021
Another hole? and in an unsanitary place as a public bathroom? Nah he going insane he gotta chill. I could feel my head being drilled.
Nakoshi head butted the shit out of Nanako, she started running like a titan lol.
Nakoshi head butted the shit out of Nanako, she started running like a titan lol.
December 19, 2021
Me ha gustado bastante, esa parte fue creepy.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 5, 2020
Four and a half stars. This is a general review of volumes 7 to 12.
I’ve been harboring a dark mood for a while, and I couldn’t be bothered to write anything as I was reading the volumes. But it’s a rather uneventful day at work, so I might as well use my fingers.
Our protagonist was hanging out at his preferred homeless camp while riding the wave of pleasurable feelings after having raped the trauma away off a high school girl. As the plot has established, the essence of that homunculus was inevitably transferred to the protagonist, whose homunculus is looking like a psychedelic chimera. But he’s enjoying the taste of lifting people out of their psychological holes (or maybe he’s looking forward to fuck-helping some more underage girls), and he searches for the whereabouts of a homeless guy he hadn’t seen in a while. It was a retired fella who made some money finding lost umbrellas and selling them to tourists, and he spent the rest of the time sitting on the same bench and looking through some photos that we later found out are images of his family before it broke apart. The protagonist, whose fall from grace seems to have conveniently obscured most of his memory, remembers an incident from when he was a financial broker. During a date with one of the many, many girls he seduced, fucked and threw away, he explains to this person that his jobs consists of destroying companies and then making a tremendous profit selling the assets. The girl is concerned about the employees that will find themselves on the streets thanks to this act of financial terrorism, but it only takes an expensive gift to not only erase any concern, but to draw an enormous smile out of her lips. The protagonist observes the expressions of these series of women with barely concealed disgust and disdain: these aren’t people, but pretty faces and attractive bodies that can be easily bought with the loads of money he’s extorting out of society. The protagonist adds that he doesn’t give a shit about the people that get hurt by his financial maneuvers: after all, he has never met any of them, nor does he believe that he would be able to connect with how they lived. We see how he dealt with other women: he had a habit of cuming on their faces, which seemed to bother those women mostly because they had to redo their makeup. The protagonist ended up carrying lipstick everywhere because those women had to reapply it after they smeared it all over his dick. One of the women, presented with an expensive gift, commented that if he was going to buy such expensive stuff for her as compensation for coming on her face, he ought to do it more often. At this point of his life he could no longer hide from himself that discharging his love fluids in or on a succession of beautiful gold diggers didn’t satisfy him, nor could he extract any meaning from his way of life. He didn’t feel anything at all.
We learn that during a work trip to ruin some other unsuspecting company, the cab driver turns out to be someone whose company our protagonist contributed to demolish. The cab driver used to work as a regular salaryman, but when his company went belly up his wife didn’t want to support a loser. He ended up living with his son, with whom he had a somewhat stranded relationship. The protagonist is horrified at the damage he’s caused. We still haven’t seen how he decided to quit, or go on a extended vacation as it was mentioned before; still, even though I know that the protagonist isn’t a sociopath, and that he just went into that line of business because he believed that money would bring him happiness, I don’t quite buy that he could have been so disconnected from the damage he was causing to so many people, to the extent that just meeting a single one of those unfortunate plebs could have woken him up as if he hadn’t realized it before.
In any case, the punk guy, who had launched this plot by convincing the protagonist to open a hole in his skull in exchange of money, gathered enough courage to show up after he fled like a little girl from the underage girl he had attempted to seduce. Turns out that his defense mechanism consists in denying that this whole experiment interested him this much, that the whole “seeing homunculi” phenomenon the protagonist was experiencing must be a delusion. He claims that now he wants to move on to something else. He intends to pay the protagonist the rest of the money and just part ways. The protagonist won’t have it, though: he’s gotten a taste of solving people’s psychological problems and he knows that he’s not experiencing any delusion. The punk guy presents a problem to solve as well: his homunculus is a crystal container with the shape of the punk guy’s father, and filled with water. When the punk guy gets stressed, the container starts to break apart and let its water pour out. In that water, intriguingly, swims a guppy, the same kind of fish he recently bought, but that also seems to have a deeper connection with his past. In a few conversations we are treated to a philosophical argument in which they bring up that they aren’t sure if the homunculus are delusions, or in the case that they represent a reality, if they are just a projection of the protagonist’s own problems; for example, that maybe he can only see the homunculus in certain people because his subconscious has determined that those people must have problems he could identify with. To prove that the homunculi are real, he pesters the punk guy to open up about his life. In turn the punk guy reveals that he had ran a background search on the protagonist before choosing him for the trepanation, and we learn that the protagonist came from a small town and had had extensive plastic surgery done. We draw closer to the source of the protagonist’s own homunculus. The protagonist resists talking about it, but he can no longer remember how his own face used to look like, and after he had the plastic surgery done, he burned the photos of himself that he could find. He worries that whenever he looks in the mirror now he sees a lie, a constructed face, and that relates to how he’s lost his ability to connect with his senses or find general enjoyment out of life. Obviously he can’t undo destroying his original face, even though he demolished his own luxurious lifestyle to become a homeless guy in a suit and a shitty car.
In a fascinating sequence because of the way it was presented, how daring it was, and the imagination on display, the protagonist convinces the punk guy to try on the women’s clothes he’s wasted all his remaining money on. The protagonist seems to believe that the punk guy’s fashion statement came from one of the most absurd, hopeless subconscious wishes a man can have: to have been born a beautiful female in a first world country (AKA playing life in recruit difficulty). As the guy slowly buys into this feminization, the homunculi morphs and grows more defined. The protagonist won’t have enough with this private encounter, and invites/drags the punk guy into a “date” to the hotel restaurant they regularly visit. The punk guy, now an ugly-ish woman with a dick, is mortified, and can’t look at anybody in the eyes. However, he slowly grows comfortable in this new skin: he adopts a new posture and a new cadence of voice, and responds without dying of embarrassment to the people that interact with him. As both protagonists argue about the reality of the homunculi the protagonist is seeing, he has to face that he’s been fleeing from his past as an uglier small town guy, that he can’t even remember who he used to be, and that not even changing his face, turning himself into a stranger, and having lived a luxurious lifestyle has managed to make him happy. We witness the few memories he has of his past before the plastic surgery: he used to spend his days outside looking down at his own feet, because the world had shown him that it didn’t have a place for him. In the most entertaining display of absurd humor I’ve witnessed in a while, the punk guy, now crossdressing and inebriated, can’t help but burp loudly every few seconds in the middle of the high-class restaurant, while the protagonist, having a mental breakdown, is unable to lift his gaze from his feet, and has degenerated into speaking in an over-the-top small town dialect. As the crossdressing punk guy ponders on whether he should enter the men’s or women’s bathroom, the protagonist, overwhelmed by a sudden depression, leaves. However, the experiment has been a success: the punk guy’s homunculus is mostly gone.
The punk guy, still on the fence about whether or not his homunculus represents reality, visits his dying father. The punk guy has brought a gift: the guppy fish he had bought. Upon hearing how his son had named the fish, the father begins to sweat. The punk guy, however, doesn’t understand, but he ends up seeing a photo album that the father had been browsing through. In his earliest photos the child version of the punk guy is indistinguishable from a female. The punk guy is surprised, both because he hadn’t seen those photos before and because he can’t remember having ever looked like that. The father, overwhelmed by guilt, reveals that he had bought a guppy for his son back then, only to find out that the kid had become fixated by the fish, which had brought out his need to look beautiful. He had started dressing out with women’s clothes to the dismay of the father, who didn’t want his only son to turn into a faggot. Realizing that the guppy had become a symbol of natural, effortless elegance and beauty for his son, he allows his cat to break the fish bowl and for the fish to asphyxiate. He attempted then to present the deed as an accident, but his son, knowing immediately, looked at his father with disdain, unlike any look the kid had given him up to that point (that reminds me that during my childhood, my father left my parakeet out in the sun and the bird died. Shortly after my father presented another identical looking bird in the cage and said that my parakeet had escaped, but that he had managed to capture it back. My previous parakeet was playful and liked interacting, and the new one didn’t recognize me. My fucking idiotic father neither realized this would happen, nor did he realize that he didn’t need to tell me anything about the parakeet, since the last thing I knew was that the bird was in his cage alive). That look had burned into the father’s mind, and he had felt guilty for it ever since. Nearing his death he wanted to make amends and apologize to his only son for asphyxiating his natural proclivities. The memories rush to the punk guy along with the feelings he had subconsciously repressed for so long, and he breaks down in tears.
However, the next time he reunites with our protagonist, we realize that the punk guy is at peace with himself, and now no longer doubts the protagonist’s unlikely ability. He more or less suggests that he should use his gift to help more people out of their lifelong traumas.
It’s at this point of the narrative, with one of the main character’s arcs having been resolved, that the series begins to fall apart in a strange way. The quality not only of the plotting, but also of the dialogues and compositions in the panels, suffers as if the author didn’t have much of a clue on how to move on from there, and worse yet, couldn’t care about the story as much as he obviously did in the beginning. As a somewhat trite plot point, the protagonist ceases to be able to see homunculi, for no reason whatsoever. He freaks out: now he only has access to people’s façades, the “lies”, instead of to the visual representations of how they actually are. He doesn’t want to go back to his regular life. He begs the punk guy for him to clean, or reopen properly, the hole in the protagonist’s skull. The punk guy starts an argument in which he proposes that the homunculi are delusions, an absurd decision by the author that weakens this character’s character arc, given that we’ve already gone through this shit. In any case, the punk guy clears the scabbed wound in the protagonist’s skull, but that doesn’t allow him to detect homunculi again, so he steals some trepanning paraphernalia. He’s decided that if his pal won’t open another hole in his skull, he will do it himself without anesthesia and with a goddamn drill. The next time he visits the homeless camp, he goes to their public bathroom, gets butt naked and drills a new hole in his skull. He probes his brain through the new hole, and he is pleased to discover that his organ throbs “like a heart”. He immediately starts experiencing weird shit, apart from seeing the usual homunculi again.
In the middle of all this we discover that he had fled his previous life because he was just an ugly young guy without outstanding qualities and that nobody paid attention to; whenever he tried to interact with people, they simply treated him as if he wasn’t worth the effort. He had resigned himself to lower his gaze to his feet and cease caring about the world and the people that surrounded him. As a result, nothing happened to him: no conflicts, no surprises, no pains, no joys. He felt nothing. That was until a girl/young woman “rescued” him for a while. We only see a faceless female in his memories, as he can’t remember what she looked like (all this forgetting people’s faces hits home for me, because I have a significant degree of prosopagnosia), but he describes her as ugly, certainly much uglier than the beautiful gold diggers that he would fuck later in life. This young woman was weird and claimed to be able to see people’s “real forms”, which he now understands as that woman being able to see homunculi as well. She had intended to rescue him from his homunculus. She had a habit of drawing for pleasure, but also to show him how other people’s homunculi looked like. Although he only shared spaces with this woman for about three months, she left such an impression on him that she’s the only person he remembers fondly. In the present, the author introduces a new recurring character: an unique looking woman who might be an escort or in general have a few sugar daddies. In her homunculus, the woman’s face cycles between all the gold diggers the protagonist had fucked (which supports the idea that the homunculi are projections), but sometimes the face also loses all features, or becomes a creepy distortion. The protagonist gets interested in her because he remembers having met her before, as in maybe he seduced her, fucked her and threw her away. After they interact in the present, she insists on coming around, even though she realizes he’s homeless and clearly screwed up. She gives him a bunch of hamburgers.
(I reached the character limit, so I'll continue on the comments)
I’ve been harboring a dark mood for a while, and I couldn’t be bothered to write anything as I was reading the volumes. But it’s a rather uneventful day at work, so I might as well use my fingers.
Our protagonist was hanging out at his preferred homeless camp while riding the wave of pleasurable feelings after having raped the trauma away off a high school girl. As the plot has established, the essence of that homunculus was inevitably transferred to the protagonist, whose homunculus is looking like a psychedelic chimera. But he’s enjoying the taste of lifting people out of their psychological holes (or maybe he’s looking forward to fuck-helping some more underage girls), and he searches for the whereabouts of a homeless guy he hadn’t seen in a while. It was a retired fella who made some money finding lost umbrellas and selling them to tourists, and he spent the rest of the time sitting on the same bench and looking through some photos that we later found out are images of his family before it broke apart. The protagonist, whose fall from grace seems to have conveniently obscured most of his memory, remembers an incident from when he was a financial broker. During a date with one of the many, many girls he seduced, fucked and threw away, he explains to this person that his jobs consists of destroying companies and then making a tremendous profit selling the assets. The girl is concerned about the employees that will find themselves on the streets thanks to this act of financial terrorism, but it only takes an expensive gift to not only erase any concern, but to draw an enormous smile out of her lips. The protagonist observes the expressions of these series of women with barely concealed disgust and disdain: these aren’t people, but pretty faces and attractive bodies that can be easily bought with the loads of money he’s extorting out of society. The protagonist adds that he doesn’t give a shit about the people that get hurt by his financial maneuvers: after all, he has never met any of them, nor does he believe that he would be able to connect with how they lived. We see how he dealt with other women: he had a habit of cuming on their faces, which seemed to bother those women mostly because they had to redo their makeup. The protagonist ended up carrying lipstick everywhere because those women had to reapply it after they smeared it all over his dick. One of the women, presented with an expensive gift, commented that if he was going to buy such expensive stuff for her as compensation for coming on her face, he ought to do it more often. At this point of his life he could no longer hide from himself that discharging his love fluids in or on a succession of beautiful gold diggers didn’t satisfy him, nor could he extract any meaning from his way of life. He didn’t feel anything at all.
We learn that during a work trip to ruin some other unsuspecting company, the cab driver turns out to be someone whose company our protagonist contributed to demolish. The cab driver used to work as a regular salaryman, but when his company went belly up his wife didn’t want to support a loser. He ended up living with his son, with whom he had a somewhat stranded relationship. The protagonist is horrified at the damage he’s caused. We still haven’t seen how he decided to quit, or go on a extended vacation as it was mentioned before; still, even though I know that the protagonist isn’t a sociopath, and that he just went into that line of business because he believed that money would bring him happiness, I don’t quite buy that he could have been so disconnected from the damage he was causing to so many people, to the extent that just meeting a single one of those unfortunate plebs could have woken him up as if he hadn’t realized it before.
In any case, the punk guy, who had launched this plot by convincing the protagonist to open a hole in his skull in exchange of money, gathered enough courage to show up after he fled like a little girl from the underage girl he had attempted to seduce. Turns out that his defense mechanism consists in denying that this whole experiment interested him this much, that the whole “seeing homunculi” phenomenon the protagonist was experiencing must be a delusion. He claims that now he wants to move on to something else. He intends to pay the protagonist the rest of the money and just part ways. The protagonist won’t have it, though: he’s gotten a taste of solving people’s psychological problems and he knows that he’s not experiencing any delusion. The punk guy presents a problem to solve as well: his homunculus is a crystal container with the shape of the punk guy’s father, and filled with water. When the punk guy gets stressed, the container starts to break apart and let its water pour out. In that water, intriguingly, swims a guppy, the same kind of fish he recently bought, but that also seems to have a deeper connection with his past. In a few conversations we are treated to a philosophical argument in which they bring up that they aren’t sure if the homunculus are delusions, or in the case that they represent a reality, if they are just a projection of the protagonist’s own problems; for example, that maybe he can only see the homunculus in certain people because his subconscious has determined that those people must have problems he could identify with. To prove that the homunculi are real, he pesters the punk guy to open up about his life. In turn the punk guy reveals that he had ran a background search on the protagonist before choosing him for the trepanation, and we learn that the protagonist came from a small town and had had extensive plastic surgery done. We draw closer to the source of the protagonist’s own homunculus. The protagonist resists talking about it, but he can no longer remember how his own face used to look like, and after he had the plastic surgery done, he burned the photos of himself that he could find. He worries that whenever he looks in the mirror now he sees a lie, a constructed face, and that relates to how he’s lost his ability to connect with his senses or find general enjoyment out of life. Obviously he can’t undo destroying his original face, even though he demolished his own luxurious lifestyle to become a homeless guy in a suit and a shitty car.
In a fascinating sequence because of the way it was presented, how daring it was, and the imagination on display, the protagonist convinces the punk guy to try on the women’s clothes he’s wasted all his remaining money on. The protagonist seems to believe that the punk guy’s fashion statement came from one of the most absurd, hopeless subconscious wishes a man can have: to have been born a beautiful female in a first world country (AKA playing life in recruit difficulty). As the guy slowly buys into this feminization, the homunculi morphs and grows more defined. The protagonist won’t have enough with this private encounter, and invites/drags the punk guy into a “date” to the hotel restaurant they regularly visit. The punk guy, now an ugly-ish woman with a dick, is mortified, and can’t look at anybody in the eyes. However, he slowly grows comfortable in this new skin: he adopts a new posture and a new cadence of voice, and responds without dying of embarrassment to the people that interact with him. As both protagonists argue about the reality of the homunculi the protagonist is seeing, he has to face that he’s been fleeing from his past as an uglier small town guy, that he can’t even remember who he used to be, and that not even changing his face, turning himself into a stranger, and having lived a luxurious lifestyle has managed to make him happy. We witness the few memories he has of his past before the plastic surgery: he used to spend his days outside looking down at his own feet, because the world had shown him that it didn’t have a place for him. In the most entertaining display of absurd humor I’ve witnessed in a while, the punk guy, now crossdressing and inebriated, can’t help but burp loudly every few seconds in the middle of the high-class restaurant, while the protagonist, having a mental breakdown, is unable to lift his gaze from his feet, and has degenerated into speaking in an over-the-top small town dialect. As the crossdressing punk guy ponders on whether he should enter the men’s or women’s bathroom, the protagonist, overwhelmed by a sudden depression, leaves. However, the experiment has been a success: the punk guy’s homunculus is mostly gone.
The punk guy, still on the fence about whether or not his homunculus represents reality, visits his dying father. The punk guy has brought a gift: the guppy fish he had bought. Upon hearing how his son had named the fish, the father begins to sweat. The punk guy, however, doesn’t understand, but he ends up seeing a photo album that the father had been browsing through. In his earliest photos the child version of the punk guy is indistinguishable from a female. The punk guy is surprised, both because he hadn’t seen those photos before and because he can’t remember having ever looked like that. The father, overwhelmed by guilt, reveals that he had bought a guppy for his son back then, only to find out that the kid had become fixated by the fish, which had brought out his need to look beautiful. He had started dressing out with women’s clothes to the dismay of the father, who didn’t want his only son to turn into a faggot. Realizing that the guppy had become a symbol of natural, effortless elegance and beauty for his son, he allows his cat to break the fish bowl and for the fish to asphyxiate. He attempted then to present the deed as an accident, but his son, knowing immediately, looked at his father with disdain, unlike any look the kid had given him up to that point (that reminds me that during my childhood, my father left my parakeet out in the sun and the bird died. Shortly after my father presented another identical looking bird in the cage and said that my parakeet had escaped, but that he had managed to capture it back. My previous parakeet was playful and liked interacting, and the new one didn’t recognize me. My fucking idiotic father neither realized this would happen, nor did he realize that he didn’t need to tell me anything about the parakeet, since the last thing I knew was that the bird was in his cage alive). That look had burned into the father’s mind, and he had felt guilty for it ever since. Nearing his death he wanted to make amends and apologize to his only son for asphyxiating his natural proclivities. The memories rush to the punk guy along with the feelings he had subconsciously repressed for so long, and he breaks down in tears.
However, the next time he reunites with our protagonist, we realize that the punk guy is at peace with himself, and now no longer doubts the protagonist’s unlikely ability. He more or less suggests that he should use his gift to help more people out of their lifelong traumas.
It’s at this point of the narrative, with one of the main character’s arcs having been resolved, that the series begins to fall apart in a strange way. The quality not only of the plotting, but also of the dialogues and compositions in the panels, suffers as if the author didn’t have much of a clue on how to move on from there, and worse yet, couldn’t care about the story as much as he obviously did in the beginning. As a somewhat trite plot point, the protagonist ceases to be able to see homunculi, for no reason whatsoever. He freaks out: now he only has access to people’s façades, the “lies”, instead of to the visual representations of how they actually are. He doesn’t want to go back to his regular life. He begs the punk guy for him to clean, or reopen properly, the hole in the protagonist’s skull. The punk guy starts an argument in which he proposes that the homunculi are delusions, an absurd decision by the author that weakens this character’s character arc, given that we’ve already gone through this shit. In any case, the punk guy clears the scabbed wound in the protagonist’s skull, but that doesn’t allow him to detect homunculi again, so he steals some trepanning paraphernalia. He’s decided that if his pal won’t open another hole in his skull, he will do it himself without anesthesia and with a goddamn drill. The next time he visits the homeless camp, he goes to their public bathroom, gets butt naked and drills a new hole in his skull. He probes his brain through the new hole, and he is pleased to discover that his organ throbs “like a heart”. He immediately starts experiencing weird shit, apart from seeing the usual homunculi again.
In the middle of all this we discover that he had fled his previous life because he was just an ugly young guy without outstanding qualities and that nobody paid attention to; whenever he tried to interact with people, they simply treated him as if he wasn’t worth the effort. He had resigned himself to lower his gaze to his feet and cease caring about the world and the people that surrounded him. As a result, nothing happened to him: no conflicts, no surprises, no pains, no joys. He felt nothing. That was until a girl/young woman “rescued” him for a while. We only see a faceless female in his memories, as he can’t remember what she looked like (all this forgetting people’s faces hits home for me, because I have a significant degree of prosopagnosia), but he describes her as ugly, certainly much uglier than the beautiful gold diggers that he would fuck later in life. This young woman was weird and claimed to be able to see people’s “real forms”, which he now understands as that woman being able to see homunculi as well. She had intended to rescue him from his homunculus. She had a habit of drawing for pleasure, but also to show him how other people’s homunculi looked like. Although he only shared spaces with this woman for about three months, she left such an impression on him that she’s the only person he remembers fondly. In the present, the author introduces a new recurring character: an unique looking woman who might be an escort or in general have a few sugar daddies. In her homunculus, the woman’s face cycles between all the gold diggers the protagonist had fucked (which supports the idea that the homunculi are projections), but sometimes the face also loses all features, or becomes a creepy distortion. The protagonist gets interested in her because he remembers having met her before, as in maybe he seduced her, fucked her and threw her away. After they interact in the present, she insists on coming around, even though she realizes he’s homeless and clearly screwed up. She gives him a bunch of hamburgers.
(I reached the character limit, so I'll continue on the comments)
August 23, 2024
3.5
nakoshi cada vez + loquito, me encanta btw q paneles MÁS increíbles ☝️☝️
nakoshi cada vez + loquito, me encanta btw q paneles MÁS increíbles ☝️☝️
June 19, 2015
fuck.
Toma acción por su propia cuenta. El fin está cerca.
Toma acción por su propia cuenta. El fin está cerca.
December 14, 2015
Back to being completely confused.
August 22, 2019
I'm giving this volume such a low rating mainly because of the scene which I had dreaded for so long and hated so much I actually felt dizzy while reading it. I understand Nakoshi's reasoning but he's also so illogical and impulsive, I wish he'd think things through and occasionally listen to Ito. He's just not going in the right direction.
September 29, 2020
Pretty awesome manga, one of the best Psychological manga’s I’ve read! Great/interesting and exciting art and pretty great story😻👌😁
June 18, 2021
Eni.
Vrima vrrum vrrum.
Vrima vrrum vrrum.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 12, 2023
This chapter is definitely the worst one. The fact that nakoshi drilled another hole in his head was so unnecessary and I feel like instead of that we (readers) would have enjoyed a chapter of character development, not the madness of the mankind.
May 23, 2025
dammit..
October 4, 2020
3.5 stars, back to the confusion
June 18, 2022
Grottesco, horror, splatter, psicologico: un volume allucinante che preme sull'acceleratore verso il finale.
January 5, 2023
I really don't think this is as profound or groundbreaking as it's made out to be, but I rate things out of enjoyment so it gets a high score anyway.
Volume 12 narrates [main guy whose name I forget]'s descent into madness really well. It creates a very confusing atmosphere and incorporates the importance of facial expressions & body language that we were introduced to in the first volume, but that's pretty much the only taste of consistency you get.
Sometimes, when the answer to what a homunculus actually is changes, the characters' thoughts seem to be long jumping from one concept to another. You could argue that it shows °♡~the fickleness of human nature & the power of the subconscious mind~♡° but I really don't understand how these people have made it so far in life without understanding (or at least being aware of) their own motives. It does create a very intense way of learning about our characters' pasts, so I'll give them that.
On a more positive note, the art in this book reminded me of why I even wanted to get into seinen in the first place: it's amazing. It's atmospheric, detailed without being overwhelming, and I have almost 20 screenshots of the symbols used in chapters 25-27(?) alone. Despite the use of gore and nudity, those aren't elements that are heavily relied on to make the manga dark which was something I was both surprised and relieved by.
I question how necessary that panel of Main Guy clenching his cheeks while drilling a hole into his skull was but that's just seinen, I guess.
Reading this is like solving a gory puzzle within urself. 🤯🤯🤯 😱😱😱🙊🙊🙊🙊🦔4.5/5.
Volume 12 narrates [main guy whose name I forget]'s descent into madness really well. It creates a very confusing atmosphere and incorporates the importance of facial expressions & body language that we were introduced to in the first volume, but that's pretty much the only taste of consistency you get.
Sometimes, when the answer to what a homunculus actually is changes, the characters' thoughts seem to be long jumping from one concept to another. You could argue that it shows °♡~the fickleness of human nature & the power of the subconscious mind~♡° but I really don't understand how these people have made it so far in life without understanding (or at least being aware of) their own motives. It does create a very intense way of learning about our characters' pasts, so I'll give them that.
On a more positive note, the art in this book reminded me of why I even wanted to get into seinen in the first place: it's amazing. It's atmospheric, detailed without being overwhelming, and I have almost 20 screenshots of the symbols used in chapters 25-27(?) alone. Despite the use of gore and nudity, those aren't elements that are heavily relied on to make the manga dark which was something I was both surprised and relieved by.
I question how necessary that panel of Main Guy clenching his cheeks while drilling a hole into his skull was but that's just seinen, I guess.
Reading this is like solving a gory puzzle within urself. 🤯🤯🤯 😱😱😱🙊🙊🙊🙊🦔4.5/5.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 1, 2023
I laughed about this manga sucking, but never was it more nausea-inducing than here. We get some self-mutilation that gets extremely bloody. The Japanese seem to like blood or something. Even though the thing is pitch black (is manga really that cheap that its creators can't afford ink?), you know what it is. So this is just a warning to know about skipping some stuff in the beginning of the volume.
May 20, 2021
This manga series is about a homeless man, Nakoshi, who has trepanation surgery and can see homunculi. As the reader, we aren't sure yet if these are real representations of a person's inner heart and shown through the sixth sense, or if these are all an illusion. We are given hints that it is real but also are given doubts due to the deteriorating mental health of Nakoshi and his compulsive lying. At the end of the last volume, Nakoshi has seemingly lost his sixth sense during his struggle to remember the past he's intentionally erased from existence.
In Volume 12, Nakoshi is perplexed by the homunculus of a woman whose face changes. However, she is the only homunculus he sees and he is driven further into madness by this, resulting in very, very dangerous behavior to get back the sight.
In Volume 12, Nakoshi is perplexed by the homunculus of a woman whose face changes. However, she is the only homunculus he sees and he is driven further into madness by this, resulting in very, very dangerous behavior to get back the sight.
September 15, 2025
yeah this volume made ILL to the point of almost having to vomit. just ... GOD EVEN THINKING ABOUT IT NOW MAKES ME SICK OMG. the fact that he is doing this procedure HIMSELF. ALONE. IN A PUBLIC BATHROOM. is just ... and the fact that he can see the homunculus "normal" and that "hes back" is just... hes insane. hes crazy. like idk even know what you do anymore and just... im... this story is wild holy shit
February 10, 2022
Saya cukup menyukainya volume ini. Namun yaah, begitulah. Ceritanya berkembang menjadi membingungkan kembali. Apakah akan ada pencerahan pada volume selanjutnya? Selain itu di jilid ini pada beberapa panel, Yamamoto sensei cukup baik memberikan bagian yg creepy :)))
April 14, 2024
ha empezado la esquizofrenia total, que guapo. hay viñetas que van extremadamente duras y goddamn my urge de hacerme una self trepanation bien dura y desbloquear poderes. no me queda nada ya pa acabarlo, que ganas dios.
January 20, 2018
uh oh, the story got confusing again. but, I can say for once that I really enjoyed some of the art in this!
June 3, 2019
This is fabulous. It's just fabulous.
August 23, 2021
It become creepy
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 20, 2022
Buah supercrudo este tomo, otro agujero, a pelo! Esa parte ha sido mi preferida porque noté la sensación que el autor quería transmitir totalmente. Bello de punta!
May 29, 2022
Molto psicologico. Solo per adulti.
May 30, 2023
nakoshi-san mulai gila:')
October 9, 2023
My personal favorite
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