Customer Reviews

Dark Water

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This very short manga does not consist entirely of the story sinonimis with the title "Dark Water". Rather, it is a collection of 4 short stories having to do with water. The first is a predictable and very watered down version of the film "Dark Water" which explains all to much about the story as is painfully chugs along leaving you with an ending which is unexplained, unexciting, and has no pertinence to the story. This collection can be summarized as a shotty and shallow "Tales from the Crypt" a la Anime.

This is a Manga that can be regarded as "sketching material" for potentially interesting stuff - both in the quality of the stories and the quality of the art.

As other reviewers have said, the book contains four stories written by Koji Suzuki (the 'Dark Water' novel collection would be the original source here) and illustrated by MEIMU (all caps), fear of things born of water being the common thread.

I will just mention the first story, which has been used as basis for the Japanese 'Dark Water' movie which I found absolutely amazing.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the 'seed material' found here. The story is so-so and is certainly not scary (Mother suddenly goes into Halloween mode and Ghost makes a guest appearance towards the end. Is it threatening? Trying to help? In desperate pain? Does it even exist outside of the mother's fantasy?) The art also needs some work, MEIMU has a clear problem with relative sizes in a 3-D scenery (the little red bag on page 42 would have to be about 2 inches wide to look like that in the trashcan), the photographed and photoshopped background scenery is distracting and the drawing style of the child's face somehow jars with the drawing style of the mother's face. No cigar!


Now go and get the DVD, even if ADV has the gall to force you to preview all of their 'other cool stuff' before you even get to the root menu.

I have neither seen the acclaimed film, nor read the original short story collection of "Dark Water" (Honogurai mizu no soko kara - direct translation is "From the gloomy waters") My only exposure to Koji Suzuki's infamous tales of watery woe is this manga, adapted by Meimu who also adapted Koji Suzuki's "Ring 2" and "Ring 0: Birthday."

Each of the four stories involve, as expected, something creeping in from the unseeable depths of murky waters, both physical and metaphorical. Like a comic pulp-anthology from the 50's, maybe "Tales from the Crypt" or "Vault of Horrors," the tension relies on less of a twist ending than a sense of rising horror as things come bubbling to the surface in a sequence or unrelated tales.

The initial story, "Dark Water," involves a murdered child speaking with a ghostly voice, imprisoned in a water tank on the roof of a building. She seeks to make her voice known, through possession and rage. This is followed by "Island Cruise," with another dead child facing off against the innocent power of positive thinking. "Adrift" is strictly comic-relief, with bikini-clad sailors pulling up something terrible on their fishhooks. The final entry, "Forest Beneath the Waves," is the least horrific but the most emotional at the same time.

While interesting, unfortunately the stories are not well adapted. Meimu's style does not lend itself to the subject matter, and the stories do not come off as scary. Possibly it comes from attempting to fit too much into too small a volume, or possibly it is something in her art style, but the horror in the tales is lost. There is enough of a kernel here to make me want to seek out the original collection, but this manga just doesn't do it for me.