2 Stories Beautifully Merge in ‘Heavenly Delusion’

Tengoku-Daimakyo (Heavenly Delusion)
by Masakazu Ishiguro (Kodansha)

By Kanta Ishida / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

12:00 JST, November 15, 2024

For a long time, I have been interested in Masakazu Ishiguro, a manga creator with a cult following. His latest tour de force, “Tengoku-Daimakyo” (“Heavenly Delusion”), has been serialized in the monthly manga magazine Afternoon since 2018, but so far I have neglected to introduce it to you. So I have decided to take this occasion to write about it. I will explain later what the occasion is.

The story opens on a group of boys and girls living at a school facility isolated from the rest of the world. The children have been here since they were born, so they have never seen the outside. All that the principal tells them is that “outside is a filthy hell.” One day, Tokio, one of the students, receives a mysterious message: “Do you want to go outside?” This school is also a research institute, where it seems some kind of dangerous experiments are being conducted. The children work together to break through the walls that surround the school.

It then shifts to show Kiruko, a woman who does odd jobs, and Maru, a young boy, who are traveling together through a Japan that has been reduced to ruins. Maru’s destination is a “Heaven” said to exist somewhere in the country. Kiruko, hired by Maru as a bodyguard, has the body of a woman but the mind of a boy, the result of a younger brother’s brain being surgically transplanted into his older sister’s head. Various places across the country are infested with grotesque monsters called hitokui, or cannibals, but Maru possesses mysterious powers that can defeat them. The two of them wander around this ominous, hellish realm, seeking information about “Heaven.”

“Heavenly Delusion” alternates between telling these two seemingly unrelated stories mentioned above, so it is hard to make sense of it at first. The whole picture finally begins to take shape around the sixth volume. Suddenly, the two stories begin to beautifully merge with each other, which makes the reader want to read it again from the beginning. But even from that point, there is a lot of story left, and many more mountains await. The 11th volume of the manga was just released the other day, but the ending is not yet in sight.

What made Ishiguro famous was probably “Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru” (And yet the town moves), his first serialized manga. It is a slice-of-life comedy set in an old-fashioned shopping street which is home to a “maid cafe,” staffed with waitresses clad in housemaid costumes. Ishiguro shrewdly planned the order of the episodes to turn the whole thing into a sort of narrative trick. I seriously wondered how his brain is structured to be able to produce such a phenomenal, mind-boggling work.

Ishiguro’s meticulous attention to detail is on full display in “Heavenly Delusion” as well. I would say nearly every frame contains foreshadowing, so readers should not read quickly or carelessly. The dialogue is comical and light-hearted, but the events of the story are quite gruesome and brutal. There are many scenes clearly meant to evoke Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1980s manga series “Akira.” I can also sense Ishiguro’s strong desire to update this iconic masterpiece of apocalyptic sci-fi for the Heisei (1989-2019) and Reiwa (2019-) eras. In addition, “Heavenly Delusion” is sprinkled with homages to numerous other manga and anime as well, offering readers the extra fun of hunting for references.

Lastly, as promised above, a word about why I took up “Heavenly Delusion” on this occasion. In the manga, Japan was reduced to ruins by a huge catastrophe that struck on “Nov. 11, 2024.” Are we now in a “heavenly delusion” or a hellish realm?