The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 3

The Drifting Classroom #3

by Kazuo Umezu

As sixth-grader Sho fights for his life in the buried city that once was Tokyo, his cries for help travel across time and reach the ears of his mother in the distant past. But how can she save her son now? Back at the school, as their resources dwindle, the students revert to savagery and despair. Suddenly, a dying student staggers in from the wasteland, bearing signs that life may exist somewhere in their new world. Together with the last surviving adult, the children march into the desert...but are they ready for what they find?

Genres: Manga, Horror, Comics, Graphic Novels, Science Fiction, Fiction, Japan

208 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 2006

About the author

Kazuo 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.

Reviews

[Tawfek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sadly i butchered this volume because i stopped reading for many days.
Sho's mother in the past hears his cries for help and manages to help him after many trials and tribulations, sho manages to beat his teacher thanks to the knife his mother left him.
Sekiya escapes his imprisonment and terrifies the kids again.
The children go to the desert to search for plants and they find some with fruits that turns to sand in their mouths and a terrifying monster that chases them all over, sekiya loses his mind in the process.
Also a girl gang takes over the school and so far it doesn't seem anyone can challenge them.
I read a few reviews and it seems we all agree that this is a terrifying and great manga especially for the year it came out in the 70th.

[daph pink ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The manga's violence against children is excessive. The thought of bridging the future and present was particularly appealing to me.

Let's see where this goes from here. The new "Princess" has arrived, and she is cruel..

[☾❀Apple✩ Blossom⋆｡˚ · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is so over the top lol

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

The action continues at a manic, frantic pace as kids venture out to see if vegetation exists. They find a monster of course. Lives are lost. Mom seems to hear Sho, though no one else can, so this is going on as the kids try to survive. The crazy lunch guy, whom they locked in a locker, gets out. The kids decide to make a ritual sacrifice of one of them, thinking HE is the reason for the catastrophe. Sho stops them from burning him at the stake. Everyone except Sho seems insane. Then a power struggle develops between a girl gang leader and Sho that will continue, I am sure.

Another reviewer caught this great line, the best so far, and maybe a key to the slight comic, over the top tone of the series, spoken by the violent girl gang leader: "Mind your own fucking business. Bitch, no one calls me a gang leader. If you've got to call me something call me Princess!" So now a lot of kids call her princess. … or she'll kill them, duh. :)

I dunno, it's over the top nuts, and includes every type of child fear that exists. Nothing like this comic exists in the west, and it is from the seventies.

[Jon Ureña · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm reviewing just this volume.

As a general impression, I'm surprised by how quickly the situation has worsened to critical levels. You could have expected this degree of mayhem and implosion of the local population near the ending of the second act, but not by the third volume of eleven. The author doesn't give his characters a break.

By the end of the previous volume (or the beginning of this one, I can't be sure about anything anymore), our kids, led by the protagonist (who is clear-headed and strong-minded beyond his years), have found buried shallowly in the sand near the school's entrance the missing plaque with the school's name, along with, most importantly, a memorial to the more than 860 children and teachers who perished. The plaque has crumbled after a long, long time under the sun. Turns out the school was teletransported to the distant future. Curiously this improves the kids' mood: their parents haven't been killed by whatever nuclear disaster turned everything into a sandy wasteland; instead they just died due to the passage of so many years that their bones probably disintegrated. This means that their parents are still alive, in the past. Which is true of everyone who ever existed.

In any case, the remaining adult teachers, once they learn that nobody is going to save them, lose their shit. One of them, the most intelligent seeming, slices his own throat in front of his horrified colleagues. Our protagonist's homeroom teacher, who had seemed decent enough (for a schoolteacher), begs for someone to restrain him before he does something horrible. They refuse to do so, and instead they attempt to drag him somewhere to calm him. He proceeds to strangle an old colleague of his (probably the headmaster). After that, the headroom teacher murders offscreen every single other teacher. By the early beginning of the third volume, the only adults that remain alive are this sudden mass murderer and the former guy in charge of the food (who had been restrained by a group of determined kids and locked into some convenient cell-like space).

The murderous teacher gathers the kids to tell them the news, though keeping to himself that he was responsible for his colleagues' demise, and convinces them to work together to survive this impossible situation. He enlists the willing protagonist and a bunch of his friends to drive one of the teachers' cars as far enough as they can, in order to figure out if there's anything out there beyond sand. Far from the school, after they get out of the car and wander for a bit, the kids discover that one of them, the last in line, almost died after someone wrapped a piece of plastic around his head. He warns the other kids about the murderous teacher, but it's too late. The guy, after he fails to kill the kids by hand, gets on his car and attempts to run them over. He kills a couple of them Carmageddon style. Our protagonist was lagging behind, as he was helping a random blonde girl with a limp. They attempt to escape through some caves, only to discover that they were the half-buried remains of the top suites of a still standing hotel. The teacher catches up to them, knocks the blonde out and then starts strangling the protagonist.

The narrative cuts to the distant past to follow the protagonist's mother. The morning when her son disappeared they had argued heavily, and she had told him to never come back home if he so wished. Now his son has disappeared and she blames herself for it: if she had never said something so awful to her dear son, the school wouldn't have exploded. She realistically suffers a psychotic break in which she hears her son calling for help. Because this is a fictional story, turns out her motherly powers allow her to track down her son's cries for help up to the suite of the still standing hotel. She freaks out the couple that had rented the room, as she believes they had kidnapped her son and were about to kill him. She realizes that something more otherwordly is going on, but in any case they throw her out of the hotel. She decides to don a costume, rent that now empty room and hide the protagonist's (who is, let's recall, a child) favorite hunting knife. She wraps it in plastic so it won't decay (how do you know he was transported to the future?), she opens a hole in the wall and hides the knife there. I'm surprisingly fine with the protagonist's mother being able to bridge spacetime with her motherly powers.

Back in the story's present, the protagonist, close to death, grasps the knife her mother left him, and plunges it into the teacher's neck. The guy falls forward into empty space, though we didn't see him die. A proper punishment for his choice of profession.

Our protagonist and his blonde pal come back to the school only to discover that the surviving children, now deprived of adult guidance and faced with the prospect of dying of thirst or starvation in the middle of a desert, have proceeded to the next logical step: they crucify one of the children, light a fire under his feet and intend to stab him with spears so his blood, on contact with the flames, will bring forth the rain. The protagonist has had enough of this shit, in general. He goes back to his classroom, where his classmates are complaining about lacking water and food. The protagonist suddenly remembers that the school has a pool, a fact about their surroundings that every other one of the hundreds of children managed to forget. After realizing they have a supply of water for the time being, the kids remember that they have pockets in their clothes and that they used to stuff them with food. They gather everything they can find. Now they will be able to drink stale, chlorinated water and trash food for a few days. I think that the protagonist uses this fact to convince the suddenly formed cult of murderous kids to knock it off. Maybe he convinced them in some other way, I can't remember. In any case, he gathers all the students his age in the gymnasium and he gives them a surprisingly adult speech about how the real adults couldn't handle having been transported to the future, because the adults' minds have solidified into logic and reason, but kids can adapt to any situation, and that's how they will survive, or something. He convinces them to act as father and mother figures to the children from the lower grades. The main female classmate proclaims that she's eager to be a mother.

Shortly after, one of the kids the murderous teacher had ran over had staggered his way back to the school just to give the protagonist an alien-ish leaf and then die. Starving as he was, they find out that he had stuffed his mouth full of sand. Apparently when one is close to starving to death, sand looks appetizing. Meanwhile, one of the dumber kids had been given the task to feed their adult prisoner (the food delivery guy who had attempted to wasteland warlord his way out of this situation). The guy convinces this dumb kid to give him some wire, and he picks the lock of whatever cell-like space he was in. He pushes the plate of food against the kid's face and then kicks him to the ground. As the protagonist was about to share the discovery of the leaf with the other children, the adult, armed with a knife, comes out and proclaims that as the only adult, he will act with the kids however he damn pleases. Learning about the leaf, somehow they convince the extremely hostile adult to walk together in the direction the kid who starved had come from. Along the way they realize that the adult doesn't know that they've been transported to the future, and predictably, being told so only causes him to kick and beat the defenseless children. Suddenly they stumble upon an alien-looking "forest", something of an oasis. Turns out enough time has passed for horrible monsters to evolve (or the author cared very little about making this realistic), and they end up being pursued by a terrifying, enormous centipede-like thing. The bad guy knocks one of the kids to use as bait, and then they attempt to escape. Some of the shittier kids betray others. Even the adult gets molested by the creature.

The narrative leaves those people behind to follow the kid who had betrayed others to survive. As he arrives at the school, the female classmate who couldn't wait to be a mother can't believe the protagonist is dead. With the de facto leader gone, some others step forward to fill the void of power. Turns out the school had a girl gang, and its leader, a nasty, older looking girl, establishes her dominance by clawing a male kid's face and then stripping down and allowing one of her henchgirls to crush another kid's nuts. As the new leader of this doomed population, the girl proclaims that she'll execute whoever had stolen food and left a shoe behind. One of the children runs away, and they pursue him. Turns out the protagonist and most of the others, including the adult, had managed to survive the encounter with the monster, and had staggered their way back to the school. The gang of girls clash with the protagonist. The delivery man can't adult anymore; the encounter with such a horrifying creature, combined with discovering that he had been transported to the future, had literally turned his mind back into a toddler's. In any case, the volume ends with a memorable focus on the kids from the lower classes, who, having fallen into psychotic depression themselves, have gathered on the roof of a nearby building to yell, cry and proclaim that they'll fly back to their parents. One of the children states that he'll turn into a bird, and jumps off. The panels follow him falling down with a determined look on his face, only to splash against the concrete. His classmates, up on the roof, look up to the sky, tears in their eyes, and proclaim that they can see his fallen classmate as he flies towards freedom.

What an entertaining series. It keeps hitting you with charmingly crazy shit and what passes for deadpan humor (which probably wasn't intended), such as the reactions of the protagonist to watching other children spearing a crucified child, or his female classmate eagerly offering herself as a mother, or the limping girl's introduction full of unasked exposition about herself travelling alone towards whatever is left of her hometown (only to be told by the protagonist that she's walking in the wrong direction), to the deranged adult delivery man claiming that children are like beasts and he can do whatever he wants with them (to the bafflement of the all too conscious children), along with many other little moments that unfortunately I can't recall, and that had me giggling to myself on the train to work. This one is a deserved classic.

[Quentin Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really good series, but I'm thinking it had to be controversial when it was released in 1972. There's a lot of violence against children, both by other children and by adults. The kids end up going lord of flies and things get really bad. Oh, and the monsters I've been waiting on finally start showing up. There's also some cool linking of timelines here between the post apocalyptic world and the "normal" world. This is a really strong series so far.

[Mateen Mahboubi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This series is totally off the rails. No one is safe. Adults dying left and right. Sand monsters, plants that become sand when eaten. Who knows where this is going. With the amount of death and disorder already present, I'm surprised that this series makes it 11 volumes.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is classic horror in that you want to put it down, but you just can't because you HAVE to find out what happens to the characters. The description on the back cover is definitely accurate. "It's Lord of the Flies on amphetamines" or maybe peyote. Either way, it's one heck of a story.

[Ahmed · Rating 2 out of 5]

wtf am I reading

[Michael Sorbello · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am binging this series. Unfortunately this means that all the events start blending into each other and I keep forgetting what happened when exactly. So, I have to be quick ang get this review written down.

In this volume, it is confirmed that Sho’s mother is somehow still connected to her son. She is the only one who is still able to hear him across millions (I presume millions but it could be only thousands, or even less) of years. This of course is a great way to introduce new ways of tormenting the school children while still having a lifeline to save them with not-so-modern means from the past.

Also, remember when I said all the adults were crazy? Well, basically all children are crazy as well…They are alright with killing each other and not just killing, but doing so in very ingenious, painful ways.

Think that an evil murderous teacher, a hoarding delivery man, futuristic wasteland and tribal peer-killing children are the worst that could happen? Think again because a new evil is introduced: a hungry centipede (and not the cute kind as in the hungry caterpillar).

Poor, poor school kids…

[Agung Wicaksono · Rating 4 out of 5]

Salah satu momen di volume ini adalah ketika para anak SD secara alamiah memutuskan untuk berpolitik supaya tidak ada lagi kerusuhan dan kepanikan yang melanda mereka. Mereka menunjuk Sho sebagai perdana menteri, mengalahkan Princess yang dianggap sebagai pembuat onar. Lantas, ketika Sho sudah dipilih, ia langsung membuat strategi supaya kondisi di sekolah tetap aman serta memilih anak-anak yang dirasa mampu untuk menjadi menteri. Rencana terdekat mereka adalah melawan monster serangga di luar sekolah yang kemungkinan besar akan menghampiri mereka.

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sho returns to the school after being attacked by a giant centipede-like monster only to find that it has been taken over by a girl gang.

Bizarre! An elementary school that's been shifted to the future, adults who go insane and kill themselves and the kids, kids burning each other at the stake - this series goes deeper into the rabbit hole of child torture and death with each volume. I'm not loving it but I am intrigued so I'll give the fourth volume a try.

[Sebastián · Rating 4 out of 5]

"why did the adults die?"
"adults are always so reasonable and logical, when something happened that they couldn't understand they all lost their minds. we kids know that anything can happen, which is why we're ok. but because we can believe anything, we might also believe things that aren't real, which is why some people thought that sacrificing the school bully would make things better. So let's be careful! We have to fall someplace in-between!"
(paraphrased)

[Felicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice volume. Little by little we get to know more about the world in which the schoolchildren happen to be. Very nice chapter where mother hears Sho's voice and does everything to leave him a knife to defend himself. The adults who arrived in the future have completely lost their minds. Pity and compassion belong only to a few enlightened children. The art is very detailed and beautifully expresses the emotion of the moment.

[Jessica]

Okay so I actually read all three of the huge volumes, but I am too lazy and Goodreads is very annoying, so I am just gonna leave it as such. I ... wow, what an ending? Wholly confused, but feeling accomplished as I think I've read over 2k pages of this manga!

[Anubhav · Rating 4 out of 5]

well that escalated quickly

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

In such apocalyptic times, what is normal?

[Angie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow this is so grim.

[Dani · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story got real interesting!
but I'm gonna stop now I'm kinda tired of it

[Lizz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[Sophie Isabelle Gaumond · Rating 4 out of 5]

😲😲😲

[Ostrava · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this school some kids get crucified while others get stepped on their balls.

[Mal Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can see why people are giving this book 4 stars. It has a lot of violence against children. Along with that it is full of gore and loads of psychological turmoil that many readers can find it disturbing. There are also outdated views of women (misogyny). However, the art in this book is amazing. I have come across many mangas where I would have a hard time telling what is going on and in this I don't. Also, the story keeps getting more and more interesting, along with that certain plot points start to shift and open up. I definitely recommend this series to fans of horror manga, but if you can't handle violent deaths or gore you probably shouldn't read this. I would not let a child read this, while the main characters are children this isn't suited for them.

[Peter Barr · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the third in the series of The Drifting Classroom, a graphic story of a school that goes missing. The school has new adventures and problems along the way.

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story becomes complicated by a parallel time episode involving Sho's mother. I suspect this will become a more common motif. Back at the school, enterprising pre-adolescents have decided that blood sacrifice is the way to solve their problem and they have picked out an unpopular kid for a victim. But there is a new boss in town, the leader of a girl gang who delivers possibly the line ever spoken by a sixth-grader, "Mind your own fucking business. Bitch, no one calls me a gang leader. If you've got to call me something call me Princess!"

And a giant insect monster is roaming the wasteland.

[quinnster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sho's mother seems to be the only one who can hear Sho's cries for help as he's being strangled by his teacher. Not only can she hear him, but she can pinpoint exactly where she believes him to be. Unfortunately, he's not there - in that time.

Back at the school the kids are going nuts, believing if they sacrifice someone whose name starts with 'TA' then their world will return to normal.

At this point it would seem that all of the adults are dead except for the crazy lunch delivery guy that they locked up. The tension basically is relentless. There is something around every corner and the kids are fighting not only the elements, but each other.

[Emkoshka · Rating 3 out of 5]

After a shaky beginning, I'm hooked on the story and characters now and will keep reading to the end of this series, I reckon. That said, Sho is such a brat. And his idea of moving a situation along is to slap around his gal pals! Is that a Japanese boy thing, or just a boy thing? The first chapter involving Sho's mother was classic, both in its depiction of a 1970s skyscraper hotel and the plot point involving a knife in a wall. So clever! The introduction of a monster in the desert was also a good plot development even if it does look like a centipede-scorpion-spider-lobster hybrid. Wasn't so keen on the girl gang that emerged towards the end of the volume. I smell a showdown coming.

[Sue Moro · Rating 4 out of 5]

A boy, carrying a leaf, dies at the school gates after returning from the wasteland. With the possibility of vegetation and food, Sho and a few of the students venture out into the wasteland. Meanwhile, back at the school, a new girl and her cohorts try to bully their way into taking over the school.

There is also an interesting event that takes place that seems to be some sort of link between Sho's current world and the world of the past where his mother still lives. I expect this to be a reoccurring theme as the series continues.

[Ana · Rating 3 out of 5]

As crianças tomam o controle da situação e conseguem, depois de algumas peripécias mais malucas, ser mais racionais que os adultos e colaborarem para conseguirem sobreviver.
O pior é quando o "homem a comida" volta a escapar.

Este é um manga com uma narrativa exagerada, que chega a ser um pouco irritante, mas ao mesmo tempo envolve e dá vontade de continuar a seguir as peripécias destas crianças.