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The Drifting Classroom #4
The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 4
When a despotic student attempts to take control of the school, Sho tries to bring his classmates to their senses. But while the students squabble over power, something horrible comes closer and closer...something that followed them out of the wasteland...something that can't be stopped. As the school is besieged, the students fight back desperately, weak with hunger. But this time, running out of food is the least of their worries. This time, they are food...
192 pages, Paperback
First published February 20, 2007
6 people are currently reading
220 people want to read
About the author
Kazuo Umezu
131 books305 followersKazuo Umezu or Kazuo Umezz was a Japanese manga artist, musician and actor. Starting his career in the 1950s, he is among the most famous artists of horror manga and has been vital for its development, considered the "god of horror manga". In 1960s shōjo manga like Reptilia, he broke the industry's conventions by combining the aesthetics of the commercial manga industry with gruesome visual imagery inspired by Japanese folktales, which created a boom of horror manga and influenced manga artists of following generations. He created successful manga series such as The Drifting Classroom, Makoto-chan and My Name Is Shingo, until he retired from drawing manga in the mid 1990s. He was a public figure in Japan, known for wearing red-and-white-striped shirts and doing his signature "Gwash" hand gesture.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
July 22, 2023
horrific as usual, they make a government they even choose minsters of health and so on and so forth.
The big monster attacks and they manage to avoid him by putting everyone to sleep.
What's weird though is they actually go after the monster, after they barely survived an attack by it.
But they manage to learn that the monster comes from the imagination of nakata the hungry kid, so sho knocks him out and the monster and its forest disappear.
No rest for the weary though, they return to the school to find that the monster laid eggs there and now they are hatching small monsters which are like Piranhas that eats people to the bone.
Can they deal with these new monsters without killing nakata?
Is this even part of nakata's imagination this time?
What other horrors await these children from the imagination of kazuo Umezu, we need only wait and see.
2021 Read.
The big monster attacks and they manage to avoid him by putting everyone to sleep.
What's weird though is they actually go after the monster, after they barely survived an attack by it.
But they manage to learn that the monster comes from the imagination of nakata the hungry kid, so sho knocks him out and the monster and its forest disappear.
No rest for the weary though, they return to the school to find that the monster laid eggs there and now they are hatching small monsters which are like Piranhas that eats people to the bone.
Can they deal with these new monsters without killing nakata?
Is this even part of nakata's imagination this time?
What other horrors await these children from the imagination of kazuo Umezu, we need only wait and see.
2021 Read.
April 22, 2022
Isn't it true that some things were truly eh? I couldn't stop laughing when they chose ministers.
May 25, 2016
Sho decides he has to create a government for the elementary school / .. not unlike the one Japan itself has…. Can we expect political commentary? This is of course resonant of The Lord of the Flies, another child horror story about the darkness in children's souls…. So there's an election, he defeats the Princess. .. puts together a cabinet. The insect monster attacks. .. but has laid eggs that are now hatching. Insane, hysterical, breakneck pacing. After form books, the Alien-level intensity, no relief, is actually pretty funny. Can I handle. .. what . . eleven books of manic horror? We'll see.
September 2, 2021
coypaste bc its relevant. I'm on page 12 of 192 of The Drifting Classroom, V: "girls dont make good leaders. they're too emotional and narrow minded because they can have children". and you know what i- what was that? - okay... kiddo stfu, literally the guy you want to make a leader just cried, he cries like 2/3 of the time. based on that logic, he CANT be a leader; any or most of them CAN be leader bc they are children yet and not even teenagers to have children. being emotional is not a bad thing.
i know its like 50yo but jeez, make it make sense then.
also, the chair moment. very funny. i wonder what the fuck the author was thinking. i mean, its probably something based on imagination and time loops/holes or somthing like that. bet on it. it was sad to see the kids fight and die.
that hungry boy is going to eat someone, isnt he? oh well. he didnt. but it was an imagination thing.
i know its like 50yo but jeez, make it make sense then.
also, the chair moment. very funny. i wonder what the fuck the author was thinking. i mean, its probably something based on imagination and time loops/holes or somthing like that. bet on it. it was sad to see the kids fight and die.
that hungry boy is going to eat someone, isnt he? oh well. he didnt. but it was an imagination thing.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 14, 2020
I’m reviewing just this volume.
We left our doomed children in the middle of a spat between our weary protagonist, considered the de facto leader of the schoolchildren, and the gang of girls who are attempting to take over. As they were fighting near the entrance, they realize that some of the younger kids are eagerly jumping off from one of the roofs, so they can turn into birds as they fall and fly back to their parents. Even though the protagonist runs to catch one of those children, the kid crushes his face against the pavement just in front of him. More saddened than horrified at this point, he lifts the dead child and shows his flattened face to his classmates as well as to his own pals from the higher grades, as a warning of what will happen if they keep bickering instead of trying to keep the peace. Everybody’s nerves are on edge, which has been getting steadily worse in this series.
Somehow that leads to the protagonist and his trusted pals gathering in a classroom to speak about the future of their little community. They consider who should lead and how to best organize themselves. The most intelligent guy, a stereotypical looking nerd, says that in no way they should entrust their future to a woman, as they make terrible leaders because nature has designed them emotional and narrow-minded to better perform their obliged duty of bearing children. The protagonist, who has been known to bitch slap female classmates when they need to calm down, agrees, but in any case they don’t believe they should make the decision themselves. Instead they will kickstart their own tiny country by convening a democratic election. Turns out that the leader of the girl gang has had the same idea. As they move on to campaign, the girl sends her henchgirls to threaten particularly the children from the lower grades with violence if they don’t vote for her. That’s as far as she goes with electoral fraud; otherwise she waits in the gymnasium to hear the results. Turns out it’s a tie between her and the protagonist, an unrealistic result (because she hadn’t shown any ability to lead beyond being able to hold the position due to temporal physical strength) that ends up tipping over to the protagonist when the guy reading the votes casts his own. The girls, disappointed in the lack of education of the electorate, decide to exile themselves and form their own society somewhere else. It speaks to this gang leader’s honor that she doesn’t pretend that a foreign school hacked the elections.
Our protagonist, the newly elected president of this doomed country, proceeds to elect his ministers. Even though their supplies dwindle rapidly, they consider that their most pressing threat is the monster they met in that random oasis in the middle of the desert. Most of the children barely believe the monster exists, as just a handful of people saw it, but the people closest to the protagonist, starting with the newly chosen Minister of Defense, start planning the defenses. Meanwhile they have to deal with a local monster of sorts: a guy who initially seems to be starving, but that in reality has fallen into some nervous state in which he just feels he’s starving no matter how much he eats. Beyond the annoyance of hearing him shouting, he threatens others’ lives by devouring the very limited supplies. The protagonist, trying to contain the situation, ends up chasing the fleeing cookie monster to the entrance. The children involved in setting up defenses had built there a complicated and impressive spike trap that the cookie monster kid is unaware of. The protagonist saves him, triggering the trap and almost dying. Now they were mostly worried that the monster would attack them, as they had just unset their most powerful trap. I thought that they were being dumb to begin with, given that the monster, as an animal, had just felt threatened in his territory and wouldn’t have crossed the span of desert in pursuit. But turns out I’m the dumb one, because the monster appears on the horizon. None of the defenses, including gates and doors, stop this unrelenting giant centipede of doom as it climbs towards the classrooms where our main characters are holding up. The Minister of Defense bravely decides to board up a classroom and defend it as a last stand of sorts. Unfortunately the monster breaks through the defenses. The Minister of Defense charges with a stone axe, only to have his arm chopped off. The other children manage to get good hits even in the monster’s eyes, but the creature remains unhurt, and in turn maims and kills other children. The Minister of Defense won’t give up, though. Determined, he grabs the stone axe from his chopped off hand and does his own version of the “my soldiers, rage” kind of thing. Shinzou wo sasageyo !
Meanwhile, the president and his loyal pals have gathered to figure out how to defeat this seemingly unstoppable monster. The intelligent nerd who had deciphered women’s nature claims to have the solution: how did the protagonist and most others who initially faced the monster in the oasis come out alive? They had been unconscious at the time, or in the case of the only remaining adult, dumb as a toddler. Although this seems too flimsy to stake their lives on, they are convinced. As they had gathered some chloroform from the school lab, they go from classroom to classroom knocking out the lower grade kids, who resist while believing they are getting murdered. However, the chloroform runs out. The remaining children, including the protagonist, decide to try their best at acting like inanimate objects. When the monster breaks through, only those children who had managed to stay concentrated survive the encounter. Bored of all the pointless murdering, the monster disappears again.
The protagonist finds the remains of his Minister of Defense. The president is touched by the sacrifice of his underling, and he embraces the dismembered corpse. I liked how as the story progresses the children are no longer scared of corpses, but instead just see them as a definitive unfortunate development for the children involved. In any case, the president’s sadness turns to anger. They will avenge the fallen. They build some more stone weapons, as well as contraptions to hopefully entangle the unstoppable monster, and they march towards the oasis. For some reason they bring along the kid who at all times he feels as if he’s starving.
They reach the oasis, but the monster is nowhere to be found. Had it turned around, and is it now attacking the defenseless school? Suddenly the girl with a limp arrives and shows the protagonist a drawing they found. It depicts the monster and the variety of plants in the oasis, but the drawing had been made years ago, by the guy who needed to eat all the time. Obviously that is impossible. The nerd, the only beacon of truth in this forsaken world, suggests that this whole reality, or maybe just the monster and the oasis, must be some sort of manifestation of that fake starving kid. Eating food fuels the manifestations, and as he hadn’t eaten for a while, the monster doesn’t currently exist. To prove this hypothesis they feed the fake starving kid. Immediately the monster pops out of the sand. The children try to entangle it with their stone axe contraptions, but it doesn’t last long. Most of the children claim that they need to kill the fake starving kid, as it would probably erase the monster. The protagonist resists the idea, but as the monster threatens to dismember everybody, the protagonist makes a decision: he’ll murder the cookie monster. He plunges his knife into the kid’s heart as the monster attempts to eat them both. However, the monster crumbles into sand, along with the rest of the oasis. As the fake starving kid lies face down, the others feel terrible: it was indeed that kid’s doing, yet he wasn’t producing it willingly. He was another victim of this impossible situation. However, the kid is not dead. The protagonist reveals that he had just intended to give the kid such a realistic shock that his unconscious would just make him believe he had been killed; in the end, he had turned the knife’s blade to the side and punched the kid’s chest with his fist. The monster remains gone.
At this point I wondered if the whole premise of the story, the school having been transported to the distant future, is a supernatural manifestation of sorts, and they haven’t actually gone to the real future. How does it fit that at least one of the characters’ worst fears could become incarnated?
Not feeling triumphant, given that they have just solved a disaster in a litany of them, and crying out of nostalgia for the past they lost, they walk back to the school only to discover that they have to face another nightmare. Most people have disappeared, and one of the kids has died because of a myriad of little wounds. What the hell is going on? They follow a strange sound to one of the classrooms. When one of the kids goes in, he turns into a skeleton. The other children, horrified and confused, end up following the clues to a cellar where they see a strange stain on the walls. That stain is alive in some way, and envelops some of the children, who yell in terror and pain as their flesh is stripped from their bodies. In a memorable moment, some of the fleeing children, being consumed by this thing, grab the clothes of other children, who proceed to get consumed in turn. In the end they manage to kill a tiny spec of that living stain, only to discover that the stain is made out of tiny versions of the same monster they just made disappear. They turn against the cookie monster, now with few qualms about killing him. The protagonist resists this decision out of general principle (and because the main character has to be against the murder of other children out of narrative necessity). As they flee they stumble upon the remaining children from the school, who had fled when the stain had started killing people. We find out that the blonde girl with a limp has been a dear friend of the cookie monster for many years, and she attempts to save him from that fate. However, the stain advances, and at one point the limping girl faces imminent death. The cookie monster chooses his own fate by striking his own forehead hard with one of the stone axes. If only he had told you he was hardcore. He dies instantly, and the tide of tiny monsters disappears. The remaining children, distraught in general, have to face that even the good guys are torn into two groups: one that clings to civility, and another that will do what needs done no matter how low they must sink.
This series is hard to rate: it’s enormously entertaining and very well-plotted, but it drags archaisms from having been created in the seventies, from minor things like the uninspired panel distributions (mostly just rows of them), to major things like characters forgetting some things when it’s convenient, or coming to terms with something when realistically they wouldn’t, just so they can get pushed out of the narrative for now. Still, the series is a blast.
We left our doomed children in the middle of a spat between our weary protagonist, considered the de facto leader of the schoolchildren, and the gang of girls who are attempting to take over. As they were fighting near the entrance, they realize that some of the younger kids are eagerly jumping off from one of the roofs, so they can turn into birds as they fall and fly back to their parents. Even though the protagonist runs to catch one of those children, the kid crushes his face against the pavement just in front of him. More saddened than horrified at this point, he lifts the dead child and shows his flattened face to his classmates as well as to his own pals from the higher grades, as a warning of what will happen if they keep bickering instead of trying to keep the peace. Everybody’s nerves are on edge, which has been getting steadily worse in this series.
Somehow that leads to the protagonist and his trusted pals gathering in a classroom to speak about the future of their little community. They consider who should lead and how to best organize themselves. The most intelligent guy, a stereotypical looking nerd, says that in no way they should entrust their future to a woman, as they make terrible leaders because nature has designed them emotional and narrow-minded to better perform their obliged duty of bearing children. The protagonist, who has been known to bitch slap female classmates when they need to calm down, agrees, but in any case they don’t believe they should make the decision themselves. Instead they will kickstart their own tiny country by convening a democratic election. Turns out that the leader of the girl gang has had the same idea. As they move on to campaign, the girl sends her henchgirls to threaten particularly the children from the lower grades with violence if they don’t vote for her. That’s as far as she goes with electoral fraud; otherwise she waits in the gymnasium to hear the results. Turns out it’s a tie between her and the protagonist, an unrealistic result (because she hadn’t shown any ability to lead beyond being able to hold the position due to temporal physical strength) that ends up tipping over to the protagonist when the guy reading the votes casts his own. The girls, disappointed in the lack of education of the electorate, decide to exile themselves and form their own society somewhere else. It speaks to this gang leader’s honor that she doesn’t pretend that a foreign school hacked the elections.
Our protagonist, the newly elected president of this doomed country, proceeds to elect his ministers. Even though their supplies dwindle rapidly, they consider that their most pressing threat is the monster they met in that random oasis in the middle of the desert. Most of the children barely believe the monster exists, as just a handful of people saw it, but the people closest to the protagonist, starting with the newly chosen Minister of Defense, start planning the defenses. Meanwhile they have to deal with a local monster of sorts: a guy who initially seems to be starving, but that in reality has fallen into some nervous state in which he just feels he’s starving no matter how much he eats. Beyond the annoyance of hearing him shouting, he threatens others’ lives by devouring the very limited supplies. The protagonist, trying to contain the situation, ends up chasing the fleeing cookie monster to the entrance. The children involved in setting up defenses had built there a complicated and impressive spike trap that the cookie monster kid is unaware of. The protagonist saves him, triggering the trap and almost dying. Now they were mostly worried that the monster would attack them, as they had just unset their most powerful trap. I thought that they were being dumb to begin with, given that the monster, as an animal, had just felt threatened in his territory and wouldn’t have crossed the span of desert in pursuit. But turns out I’m the dumb one, because the monster appears on the horizon. None of the defenses, including gates and doors, stop this unrelenting giant centipede of doom as it climbs towards the classrooms where our main characters are holding up. The Minister of Defense bravely decides to board up a classroom and defend it as a last stand of sorts. Unfortunately the monster breaks through the defenses. The Minister of Defense charges with a stone axe, only to have his arm chopped off. The other children manage to get good hits even in the monster’s eyes, but the creature remains unhurt, and in turn maims and kills other children. The Minister of Defense won’t give up, though. Determined, he grabs the stone axe from his chopped off hand and does his own version of the “my soldiers, rage” kind of thing. Shinzou wo sasageyo !
Meanwhile, the president and his loyal pals have gathered to figure out how to defeat this seemingly unstoppable monster. The intelligent nerd who had deciphered women’s nature claims to have the solution: how did the protagonist and most others who initially faced the monster in the oasis come out alive? They had been unconscious at the time, or in the case of the only remaining adult, dumb as a toddler. Although this seems too flimsy to stake their lives on, they are convinced. As they had gathered some chloroform from the school lab, they go from classroom to classroom knocking out the lower grade kids, who resist while believing they are getting murdered. However, the chloroform runs out. The remaining children, including the protagonist, decide to try their best at acting like inanimate objects. When the monster breaks through, only those children who had managed to stay concentrated survive the encounter. Bored of all the pointless murdering, the monster disappears again.
The protagonist finds the remains of his Minister of Defense. The president is touched by the sacrifice of his underling, and he embraces the dismembered corpse. I liked how as the story progresses the children are no longer scared of corpses, but instead just see them as a definitive unfortunate development for the children involved. In any case, the president’s sadness turns to anger. They will avenge the fallen. They build some more stone weapons, as well as contraptions to hopefully entangle the unstoppable monster, and they march towards the oasis. For some reason they bring along the kid who at all times he feels as if he’s starving.
They reach the oasis, but the monster is nowhere to be found. Had it turned around, and is it now attacking the defenseless school? Suddenly the girl with a limp arrives and shows the protagonist a drawing they found. It depicts the monster and the variety of plants in the oasis, but the drawing had been made years ago, by the guy who needed to eat all the time. Obviously that is impossible. The nerd, the only beacon of truth in this forsaken world, suggests that this whole reality, or maybe just the monster and the oasis, must be some sort of manifestation of that fake starving kid. Eating food fuels the manifestations, and as he hadn’t eaten for a while, the monster doesn’t currently exist. To prove this hypothesis they feed the fake starving kid. Immediately the monster pops out of the sand. The children try to entangle it with their stone axe contraptions, but it doesn’t last long. Most of the children claim that they need to kill the fake starving kid, as it would probably erase the monster. The protagonist resists the idea, but as the monster threatens to dismember everybody, the protagonist makes a decision: he’ll murder the cookie monster. He plunges his knife into the kid’s heart as the monster attempts to eat them both. However, the monster crumbles into sand, along with the rest of the oasis. As the fake starving kid lies face down, the others feel terrible: it was indeed that kid’s doing, yet he wasn’t producing it willingly. He was another victim of this impossible situation. However, the kid is not dead. The protagonist reveals that he had just intended to give the kid such a realistic shock that his unconscious would just make him believe he had been killed; in the end, he had turned the knife’s blade to the side and punched the kid’s chest with his fist. The monster remains gone.
At this point I wondered if the whole premise of the story, the school having been transported to the distant future, is a supernatural manifestation of sorts, and they haven’t actually gone to the real future. How does it fit that at least one of the characters’ worst fears could become incarnated?
Not feeling triumphant, given that they have just solved a disaster in a litany of them, and crying out of nostalgia for the past they lost, they walk back to the school only to discover that they have to face another nightmare. Most people have disappeared, and one of the kids has died because of a myriad of little wounds. What the hell is going on? They follow a strange sound to one of the classrooms. When one of the kids goes in, he turns into a skeleton. The other children, horrified and confused, end up following the clues to a cellar where they see a strange stain on the walls. That stain is alive in some way, and envelops some of the children, who yell in terror and pain as their flesh is stripped from their bodies. In a memorable moment, some of the fleeing children, being consumed by this thing, grab the clothes of other children, who proceed to get consumed in turn. In the end they manage to kill a tiny spec of that living stain, only to discover that the stain is made out of tiny versions of the same monster they just made disappear. They turn against the cookie monster, now with few qualms about killing him. The protagonist resists this decision out of general principle (and because the main character has to be against the murder of other children out of narrative necessity). As they flee they stumble upon the remaining children from the school, who had fled when the stain had started killing people. We find out that the blonde girl with a limp has been a dear friend of the cookie monster for many years, and she attempts to save him from that fate. However, the stain advances, and at one point the limping girl faces imminent death. The cookie monster chooses his own fate by striking his own forehead hard with one of the stone axes. If only he had told you he was hardcore. He dies instantly, and the tide of tiny monsters disappears. The remaining children, distraught in general, have to face that even the good guys are torn into two groups: one that clings to civility, and another that will do what needs done no matter how low they must sink.
This series is hard to rate: it’s enormously entertaining and very well-plotted, but it drags archaisms from having been created in the seventies, from minor things like the uninspired panel distributions (mostly just rows of them), to major things like characters forgetting some things when it’s convenient, or coming to terms with something when realistically they wouldn’t, just so they can get pushed out of the narrative for now. Still, the series is a blast.
July 1, 2024
this was creepy af
March 4, 2022
Student politics and a monster attacking the school. Lots of excitement.
August 3, 2024
"B-Besides, girls don't make good leaders. They're too emotional and narrow-minded because they can have children."
Sure, Jan...
Sure, Jan...
February 1, 2021
Actually giving this volume 2.5 stars because the horror quality is still top notch however there's a social commentary monologue that's quite problematic. It goes like this:
"Uh, um, it's me, Gamo. I need to talk to you. I'm not very good at talking to people, but I think we need to have a government to keep everybody organized. I-I think we should call this place a country instead of a school. In other words, we're the citizens of the nation of Yamato Elementary. So we should vote for a Prime Minister right away. Otherwise, we'll end up fighting again. I looked through some psychology books in the library. We need a decisive leader! That's what we need for a terrible situation like this. It doesn't matter if he's smart, as much as whether he can lead people and make quick decisions. So, um ... the gang girl might be decisive, but sh, sh, she's too dangerouus. N-n-nobody really likes her and she'll just pick on people. B-besides, girls don't make good leaders. They're too emotional and narrow-minded because they can have children. That could be really bad if she was boss."
"Uh, um, it's me, Gamo. I need to talk to you. I'm not very good at talking to people, but I think we need to have a government to keep everybody organized. I-I think we should call this place a country instead of a school. In other words, we're the citizens of the nation of Yamato Elementary. So we should vote for a Prime Minister right away. Otherwise, we'll end up fighting again. I looked through some psychology books in the library. We need a decisive leader! That's what we need for a terrible situation like this. It doesn't matter if he's smart, as much as whether he can lead people and make quick decisions. So, um ... the gang girl might be decisive, but sh, sh, she's too dangerouus. N-n-nobody really likes her and she'll just pick on people. B-besides, girls don't make good leaders. They're too emotional and narrow-minded because they can have children. That could be really bad if she was boss."
August 1, 2011
A mass suicide among first graders convinces Sho he must set up the school as a nation. First he defeats Princess in a very close election, then he sets about establishing his cabinet He knows that the insect monster from the wastelands is soon to attack. The working out of just what this monster is is the most implausible portion of Umezu's story so far, although the use of the term "implausible" here must be relative.
Monster defeated, many lives lost, almost a return to normalcy in the Nation of Yamoto Elementary School, but unfortunately the monster has laid eggs and they are hatching. These kids just can't get a break.
Monster defeated, many lives lost, almost a return to normalcy in the Nation of Yamoto Elementary School, but unfortunately the monster has laid eggs and they are hatching. These kids just can't get a break.
July 25, 2011
The Drifting Classroom continues being weird, violent, and kind of amazing. One mystery gets solved in this volume, but, of course, more crop up. The one notable problem with The Drifting Classroom is how it sort of careens from one disaster to another. So far it hasn't really detracted, but I could see how it could get a little exhausting before I've finished eleven volumes. We'll see!
February 9, 2022
Not a big fan of the misogyny. I get that they’re kids from the 70’s with super outdated views but I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. I’m still invested in the story so I hope it’s not brought up too often.
January 18, 2015
"besides, girls don't make good leaders. they're too emotional and narrow-minded because they have children." -- a male child
September 18, 2016
Its the kind of weird and stupid shit that grows on you and you decide to humor it. Kinda like that pimple stuck in your inner thigh. wait what? Or kinda like that unibrow
August 19, 2021
This is a review of the entire series!
For Sho Takamatsu, it seemed to be an ordinary day of school like any other. In the aftermath of a sudden earthquake, his entire elementary school vanishes into thin air along with all the students and teachers that were trapped inside. The earthquake seemed to be so powerful that it caused a ripple in time, projecting the school into a dark and bleak wasteland where nothing but death, mutants and mind-breaking anomalies await. Sho takes on the role of the leader, trying to keep the other children safe from harm while searching for a way back home.
The Drifting Classroom takes things at a very slow pace. The horror elements don't even begin to seep in until several volumes into the series. While it starts off slow and does drag a bit in places, I think every volume is better than the previous. It took me a while to get into it but I really started to feel invested once I saw the bigger picture of what it was trying to portray.
While the dialogue and reactions of the characters seems a bit clunky and unrealistic at times, it's important to remember that many of the characters are extremely young elementary school students. Most of them haven't even learned how to talk properly let alone think themselves out of life or death situations. Watching children so young and vulnerable get thrown into one nightmare after the other led to some very intense chapters that didn't shy away from showing little kids being brutally murdered, eaten and smashed to pieces. It might not start out scary, but each volume escalates the horror, the violence and the stakes. As hundreds of children are driven mad with fear, hunger and isolation with no adults to care for them, it's only a matter of time until they begin to turn on each other as well. These kids can give the children in Lord of the Flies a run for their money once their minds start to break.
Some smaller things such as the art quality and the sometimes stagnant way the characters and their reactions are drawn feel off-putting and even a bit silly at times, but it's important to remember that this is one of the pioneers of horror manga, written all the way back in 1971. Devilman is another great manga that has some of the same issues. They're both great series, but you can tell they were written during the experimental phase of manga when they were just beginning to find their way into mainstream entertainment. Though certain aspects of The Drifting Classroom haven't aged that well, it was surprisingly ahead of its time in other ways. As the story progresses, it begins to tackle the themes of overindulgent consumerism, industrial pollution, and the greed of one generation causing major issues for the next generation. It goes into dark detail about how every little action we take that harms the planet hurts future generations of children far more than it hurts any of us.
For Sho Takamatsu, it seemed to be an ordinary day of school like any other. In the aftermath of a sudden earthquake, his entire elementary school vanishes into thin air along with all the students and teachers that were trapped inside. The earthquake seemed to be so powerful that it caused a ripple in time, projecting the school into a dark and bleak wasteland where nothing but death, mutants and mind-breaking anomalies await. Sho takes on the role of the leader, trying to keep the other children safe from harm while searching for a way back home.
The Drifting Classroom takes things at a very slow pace. The horror elements don't even begin to seep in until several volumes into the series. While it starts off slow and does drag a bit in places, I think every volume is better than the previous. It took me a while to get into it but I really started to feel invested once I saw the bigger picture of what it was trying to portray.
While the dialogue and reactions of the characters seems a bit clunky and unrealistic at times, it's important to remember that many of the characters are extremely young elementary school students. Most of them haven't even learned how to talk properly let alone think themselves out of life or death situations. Watching children so young and vulnerable get thrown into one nightmare after the other led to some very intense chapters that didn't shy away from showing little kids being brutally murdered, eaten and smashed to pieces. It might not start out scary, but each volume escalates the horror, the violence and the stakes. As hundreds of children are driven mad with fear, hunger and isolation with no adults to care for them, it's only a matter of time until they begin to turn on each other as well. These kids can give the children in Lord of the Flies a run for their money once their minds start to break.
Some smaller things such as the art quality and the sometimes stagnant way the characters and their reactions are drawn feel off-putting and even a bit silly at times, but it's important to remember that this is one of the pioneers of horror manga, written all the way back in 1971. Devilman is another great manga that has some of the same issues. They're both great series, but you can tell they were written during the experimental phase of manga when they were just beginning to find their way into mainstream entertainment. Though certain aspects of The Drifting Classroom haven't aged that well, it was surprisingly ahead of its time in other ways. As the story progresses, it begins to tackle the themes of overindulgent consumerism, industrial pollution, and the greed of one generation causing major issues for the next generation. It goes into dark detail about how every little action we take that harms the planet hurts future generations of children far more than it hurts any of us.
July 14, 2020
I now want Gamo to die a most painful death. He was already awkward and physically weak, but now we can add stupid to the list as well: "besides, girls don't make good leaders. they're too emotional and narrow-minded because they have children." Yeah, the 10-year-old boy genius is really endearing himself to his female readers here. But then again, this was written in the seventies, by a guy born in the thirties and in Japan where the traditional gender roles are still more present than where I live. So in that context, I’ll just roll with it (though, those girl gang members do have a point about hitting puberty earlier and therefore being more mature than the boys their age).
So in this one Sho and friends decide to make a government (an all boy government of course, the girls get kitchen and babysitting duties). First item on their list: kill the evil child-eating centipede. Second item: kill all the other child eating monsters who appear a chapter later. I don’t get how there are still so many children alive to be honest. Aw, well…I’ll just think about being a chair for a while and see how that helps improve my understanding of this crazy world.
So in this one Sho and friends decide to make a government (an all boy government of course, the girls get kitchen and babysitting duties). First item on their list: kill the evil child-eating centipede. Second item: kill all the other child eating monsters who appear a chapter later. I don’t get how there are still so many children alive to be honest. Aw, well…I’ll just think about being a chair for a while and see how that helps improve my understanding of this crazy world.
May 6, 2018
Sho sets up a government for the elementary school that's been transported to the future and the giant centipede creature attacks again.
First graders commit suicide, a monster rips children to pieces, and tiny creatures eat the flesh from others. I think I'm out on this series. If there was character-building happening along with the horrific things happening to children I might hang in there, but this story just screams from one form of harm to another.
First graders commit suicide, a monster rips children to pieces, and tiny creatures eat the flesh from others. I think I'm out on this series. If there was character-building happening along with the horrific things happening to children I might hang in there, but this story just screams from one form of harm to another.
April 19, 2021
Its actually getting better and more and more intriguing.. the psychological horror of living as kids with kids.. guiding themselves in horror like situations.
Yeah. I like this. Its a good enjoyable horror manga for its time😌
THINK ABOUT THE TIME AND PLACE WHEN THIS SERIES WERE MADE. Women didn't stand even close to were we stand today then. It is really important to read these thoughts and not to forget were women stood in our history. We have come a long way as a society.
Yeah. I like this. Its a good enjoyable horror manga for its time😌
THINK ABOUT THE TIME AND PLACE WHEN THIS SERIES WERE MADE. Women didn't stand even close to were we stand today then. It is really important to read these thoughts and not to forget were women stood in our history. We have come a long way as a society.
June 7, 2023
Monster serangga yang muncul dari hutan, diketahui berasal dari imajinasi Nakata. Lantas, ketika monster tersebut muncul, Sho berpura-pura membunuh Nakata, sehingga Nakata berpikir bahwa ia mati. Ternyata benar, si monster berubah menjadi tanah setelah kejadian itu. Teman-teman yang lain, beranggapan bahwa Nakata harus benar-benar dibunuh supaya kehidupan mereka bisa kembali normal. Namun, Sho tidak ingin mereka membunuh Nakata sebelum mendapatkan bukti yang kuat.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 27, 2020
3.5 Stars
Things start to really get far out in this volume. We have first graders leaping to their deaths, and we have a monster that isn't quite what it seems. It's getting away from what drew me to the story originally, but still good. It's not what I'd call predictable, as we're getting some things I didn't see coming.
Things start to really get far out in this volume. We have first graders leaping to their deaths, and we have a monster that isn't quite what it seems. It's getting away from what drew me to the story originally, but still good. It's not what I'd call predictable, as we're getting some things I didn't see coming.
January 15, 2020
An excellent hallmark of '70s manga horror, the stunning pen and ink techniques had me mesmerized. Umezu brilliantly builds suspense and leaves each chapter in a way that has the reader eagerly flipping the page.
June 26, 2019
so stressful!
December 26, 2019
Interesting information revealed about how the desolate world the children were transported to works.
October 8, 2020
While I loved this book just as much as the last issue I feel like this book focused too much on gender issues that honestly shouldn't even be occuring. Other than that it's a great horror read!
December 6, 2020
this is the best b-movie i've ever seen.
politics and horror were both ramped up a few notches for this volume.
politics and horror were both ramped up a few notches for this volume.
January 16, 2022
The centipede monster and its babies are scary as hell. But I didn’t appreciate the SECOND comment saying women shouldn’t be leaders.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 6, 2022
Just because of the misogyny
June 13, 2023
The whole thing is so utterly bizarre sometimes, like the chair scene.
It gets surprisingly gruesome sometimes, though. The bugs would have made me go crazy irl
It gets surprisingly gruesome sometimes, though. The bugs would have made me go crazy irl
January 1, 2025
Scary and disturbing. Kids have so many resources. The giant centipede that only attacks those who show fear is a cool idea. The frightened faces are really well drawn. The reading pace is brisk.
December 2, 2025
Dopo questo volume misogino e assurdo (in modo negativo, per quanto io la consideri quasi sempre una qualità positiva), abbandono la serie con dispiacere.
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