Adabana Volume 3 Review

Adabana comes to its conclusion here in Volume 3, but what secrets are in store, and where will this tale lead Mizuki, who is due to be sentenced for her supposed murder of Mako? With this final volume in hand, let’s find out what’s next for our cast.

While Volume 2 primarily followed Mako’s perspective, for this final volume we return to Mizuki and pick up just after the duo murdered Mako’s uncle. While cleaning the murder scene, Mizuki comes across a laptop with pornographic videos of Mako, which we know her uncle had been selling. But Mizuki realises that someone else must have been involved, and that person is likely to be Yuki.

So Mizuki approaches Yuki since she wants to get rid of all the footage of Mako out there, but she neglects to tell her friend about this plan, so Mako is left feeling anxious. Having had so many bad experiences at the hands of Yuki, she doesn’t want Mizuki involved with him, and she can’t understand their newfound friendship.

As this is the final volume, the story continues to the point of Mako losing her life and finally returning to the present day where Mizuki is due to be sentenced for her crimes, which are numerous. I think mangaka NON has gone about this in a rather smart way because we get to see the truth of what happened with Mako just over the halfway point of the book and then get to spend a significant amount of time in the present following her attorney, who is still trying to piece everything together.

Rather than Volume 2, where it felt like a lot of the twists and turns were for the shock factor, #3 returns to a lot of what I liked about the first instalment. We’re still shown plenty of horrific events, but there’s purpose in what’s being portrayed and how Mizuki is handling it all. It feels like the whole thing holds together better and makes more sense. Although I imagine readers will be divided on how they feel about the truth behind Mako’s death.

While I feel it was important narratively that we return to the present day sooner than later, one downside of this is that we still don’t get to know her attorney very well, and a lot of his scenes feel almost like comic relief. He has a job to do and he does it, but the tone is more humorous than anything else in this series has been and it just doesn’t fit in. It’s almost like NON became aware too late in the process that this series had been far too dark with little reprieve.

Having said all that, now we’re at the end, and I look back over the whole series, I don’t regret reading it. I don’t think it delivered on the initial promise it showed, but as someone with an interest in the mangaka, I enjoyed seeing the contrast between this and their other work. As a standalone series outside of that, it’s hard to recommend. If you’ve made it this far, it’s worth finishing, but I think on the whole if you haven’t started it yet and wouldn’t be interested in it based on the creator as I am, then there are several other mystery series that are more consistent that you could read instead.

Adabana Volume 3 comes to the West thanks to Dark Horse and has been translated by Caleb Cook with lettering by Brendon Hull, who have done a fantastic job the whole way through the series. Nothing to note in the way of extras.

Overall, Adabana has certainly been an interesting experience even if it hasn’t always been good. I think that dip in the middle with Volume 2 and the oddly timed comedy elements here have ended up taking away from the bigger picture, which is a shame given how much promise there was in Volume 1. Difficult to recommend as it may be, it wasn’t terrible on the whole.

Our review copy from Dark Horse was supplied by Turnaround Comics (Turnaround Publisher Services).