Gachiakuta Volumes 1 and 2 Review
It is sometimes strange where your own background and culture can take you when you read something from another culture. In the case of reviewing Gachiakuta, a manga whose hero is someone who collects and reuses rubbish thrown away by society’s elites, my first thought was: “Oh, like the Wombles!” However, this particular Womble lives nowhere near Wimbledon Common – oh, and is human, obviously.
Rudo comes from a society with strict class boundaries, being a member of the lower-class tribesfolk, shunned by the upper class. The elite of this society have a throw-away culture when it comes to rubbish. Rubbish is normally cast aside into “The Pit”, a gigantic area full of trash. Rudo cannot stand this, so he often sneaks into posh areas and goes through their rubbish to use items people have casually tossed away. At home, he lives with his adoptive father Regto, and Rudo’s most treasured possessions are his gloves which cover his blackened, bruised hands.
One day, Rudo spots a mysterious masked stranger leaving his house. When he enters, Rudo finds that Regto has been murdered. When the police arrive, Rudo is immediately suspected of being the one who committed the crime and is immediately found guilty, despite his innocence. His punishment, like that of all the most serious criminals, is death by being cast into The Pit.
However, Rudo survives. He finds himself on an enormous, seemingly never-ending pile of trash, but is then suddenly attacked by monsters made out of rubbish. Eventually another man comes to his aid and rescues him. This guy, named Enjin, tells him the truth about The Pit. Where Rudo came from was in fact a floating city known in The Pit as “The Sphere”. There are many people living in The Pit, and most despise “Sphereites” for dumping their rubbish all over them, polluting just about everything around. The rubbish has grown so vast there is now a race of monsters called “trash beasts” that terrorise the people of The Pit.
The only people who can stop the trash beasts are “Cleaners”, people who use tools called “vital instruments” to slay the beasts. Enjin is one such Cleaner, whose instrument takes the form of an umbrella. Enjin decides to recruit Rudo into the Cleaners after he discovers that his gloves are also a vital instrument and a powerful one at that, as they allow Rudo to turn anything he touches into another vital instrument. Rudo joins the group, mainly because his ambition is to hopefully find a way back to the Sphere and seek revenge on those who wronged him.
Rudo is designated a “Giver”, someone who can control a vital instrument, and alongside Enjin he also works with Zanka, whose instrument is a long staff; Riyo, who uses is a pair of scissors; receptionist Semiu, who has a pair of glasses that allow her to examine someone’s capabilities, and Gris and Follo, guys who are not Givers, but who provide handy support for the rest of the gang, such as reconnaissance and hand-to-hand fighting.
When it comes to writing and plot, Gachiakuta appears at least on the surface to be typical shonen: a hero with a goal (in this case revenge), battling monsters using special tools which differ from character to character. Some standard manga tropes appear, with Riyo falling into the category of: “female characters wielding gigantic weapons” as her scissors become huge when she fights with them. There is also some humour thrown in, which seems low-brow but given that we are dealing with a society full of trash, it’s only to be expected. The best example occurs in the first meeting between Rudo and Zanka, which ends in a fight, with Rudo using his gloves to turn a toilet plunger into a vital instrument, leading Zanka to be disgusted when it ends up getting excrement on him. (Also, cue another bit of cultural cross-over: “Oh, a plunger as a weapon. Now the Womble’s like a Dalek.”)
However, you can also argue that like with many of the best shonen series, there is extra depth to the story. Gachiakuta is a series which is clearly dealing with environmental issues, with the waste that the wealthy generate ruining the lives of others, and Rudo trying to reuse the things that everyday folks leave behind. Even when he ends up in The Pit and starts going on missions, when he sees the seas of waste, he thinks to himself that there is a load of treasure out there.
The artwork in the series might put off some readers, but personally I enjoyed it. Mangaka Kei Urana uses a lot of rough-and-ready artwork, sharp lines and pointy features to give the story the edgy motion that such a dark setting needs. It should be mentioned that Urana is not the only artist working on the series, as the inside back covers of each volume also includes work by Hideyoshi Andou, creating some cool graffiti-style art of the characters on the cover.
Having reviewed two individual volumes for this review, I find that the English-language staff does slightly differ between each book, but then again Gachiakuta also appears to differ between the print and digital versions, with two different teams of translators working between each version. Alethea and Athena Nibley translate the digital editions, while Jennifer Ward covers the print translation which is being reviewed here. While there are no obvious mistranslations I can see, I do wonder a bit regarding some of the more scatological language used, with Ward choosing words like “poo” and “turd-face”. I don’t know if this is what Urana used too, and it might just be prudishness from the American publishers, but given that this is a 16+ rated series, you could just say “shit”. The lettering and editing all appear to have been well, with Jamil Stewart’s lettering in particular adding to the pace of the story. While Matthew Akuginow is credited with the cover design, it does not differ that much from the original by Kayo Hasegawa.
While personally I doubt that Gachiakuta is going to become the next big thing shonen-wise, as there are many series in a similar style, and being a Weekly Shonen Magazine title it has a disadvantage in terms of profile, compared to series in Shonen Jump, it is a series that clearly has a lot of potential. It has already reached ten print volumes in Japan during its two-year-run, and it will be interesting to see how the story unfolds.
Read a free preview from Kodansha here.
Our review copies from Kodansha were supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.
