下弦の月

KAGEN NO TSUKI

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
3
RELEASE
May 3, 1999
CHAPTERS
16

DESCRIPTION

Mizuki is a girl who wants to run away from her life. As she smiles at everything sad that happens to her, her soul becomes heavier day by day. Her escape door is Adam, an English singer. But is he really real, or is everything they've been through just a dream? Adam sees his dead Japanese girlfriend in Mizuki, but strangely, nobody, apart from a girl who met her at the gates of heaven, can see Mizuki. This is a story that takes place somewhere between dream and reality.

(Source: Storm in Heaven)

CAST

Adam Lang
Mizuki Mochizuki
Hotaru Shiraishi
Tetsu Sugisaki
Masaki Miura
Sae Kayama
Tomoki Anzai
Sayaka Kamijou

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

RoseFaerie
81/100
A supernatural mystery that initially seems shallow, but really not everything is as obvious as it's made out to be.
I don't think Ai Yazawa's let me down once so far. Paradise Kiss, Tenshi Nanka Janai, and now Kagen no Tsuki have completely captured my heart. Kagen no Tsuki isn't even something that I would expect her to write. It's a supernatural mystery instead of her usual romantic dramas. However, this story definitely retains her signature style.

Kagen no Tsuki begins with Mizuki Mochizuki, a teenage girl who ran away from home. She meets Adam Lang, a foreign musician, and the two fall in love. When Adam tells her that he's leaving Tokyo and wants her to join him, Mizuki accepts. However, on her way to meet him, she gets hit by a car, putting an end to her attempts to reconnect. Not long after, a young girl named Hotaru comes across the abandoned mansion where Mizuki and Adam stayed together. There she finds a girl only she can see, unable to leave, and without any memories other than her lost love. Hotaru and her friends decide to help her find out who she is and find her missing lover "Adam".

The summary was a bit long this time! There's definitely a lot of story set-up. It seems very obvious how the story will turn out, and I thought I knew how everything was going to play out. It seemed so obvious. I didn't hold it against the story. After all, it was written for a younger audience. However, Ai Yazawa did not disappoint, because once the children start to find the obvious clues, they find that more and more things don't add up.

I was also impressed with the messages. It really is a story about life, love, and happiness. We take so much for granted, including our own lives. Even outside romantic love, there are still people who care about you and love you. I really appreciated it.

As for the characters, I feel like the one who had the most development was Mizuki. So many of the central themes are connected to her. I really think her growth as a character served the story well. It's interesting how her obsession with her love interest actually proved to be detrimental.

As for the four children: Hotaru, Sae, Masaki, and Tetsu, I was impressed with how well they were written. It was a a short story, with only three volumes, but I found that the characters and their backstories, personalities, and motivations were well established for something so short. I was particularly fond of Sae and Masaki.

I also thought that Mizuki's ex-boyfriend really showed a lot of growth, too. I won't discuss it in depth because of spoilers, but he has a lot of regret for the things he did in the past and was too late to even begin to make amends. I was really happy with how he turned out.

The art is also beautiful. It's Ai Yazawa's classic style and really helps make it feel like her own work, despite the genre not being something she usually does.

Like I said in my review of Tenshi Dakara Janai, I wish her works for Ribon were better known. Since Paradise Kiss and NANA are so well known, I'd think that publishers would make more of an effort to bring her stuff over. This is such a nice story, and I hope to see more people checking out older shoujo like this sometime soon.
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