神の子供

KAMI NO KODOMO

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
1
RELEASE
March 6, 2010
CHAPTERS
11

DESCRIPTION

The latest work by the Nishioka siblings depicts the gruesome life story of a ruthless and brilliant serial killer as he grows up from a sociopathic child to a messiah-like figure.

CAST

Kami no Ko

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

TheGruesomeGoblin
70/100
An appropriately disturbing look into the mind of a monstrous person. Good horror, though not a fun read.
Kami no Kodomo or rather... um, God's Child is...

...An interesting read. I definitely recommend it to any and all who are looking to read something light that will brighten their day and not make them feel... bad... and mildly disgusted. Maybe somewhat disgusted. Okay, I'll be generous and give you a moderately disgusted.

Look, let's just get into explaining what this is and why I'm gonna end up giving it a positive score.

The Birth

Okay, God's Child is a 2009 manga by Nishioka Kyodai which is in fact not a single person but rather a brother and sister which... I guess this is just the sort of manga they're both interested in doing?

That being said, God's Child is a look into the mind and life of a... "unique" child who grows up and essentially very quickly develops a God complex and becomes not only a serial killer, but forms his own cult of youths resembling himself when he was a boy that also go around killing people. He also has sex with them, and to them, he is essentially their God.

...I know how this is sounding as I continue describing it, but you're not really supposed to "feel good" when reading a psychological horror, are you?

I just want to take this moment though to ask, did we really need to hear his thoughts on being conceived? Look, I don't care how intelligent or fucked up of a mind you're gonna develop later, you're not going to have memories from your time as a SPERM.

If it wasn't obvious, the birth of the "Child" is in fact the first chapter of the manga, and it ends with the newly born child straight up internally declaring that he's going to get revenge on the world. For being born. He wants revenge on the world for being born.

Which I guess is a fine enough note to start the tale of a monster.

The Child

While it becomes very clear that the Child is already on the path to becoming a monster, it's not like the others around him are perfectly nice people. Although, that itself is debatable since the entire manga, we're getting the thoughts and the viewpoint of the child itself. Like there's a custom where he was born that if a child before his first birthday stands up, the family attaches a large ball of sticky rice to their back which would cause them to fall over so they "wouldn't leave their parents."

Basically, when the ten month old Child doesn't fall over with the rice attached to his back, one of the adults outright pushes him to make him fall down.

Putting the idea that the Child was in fact inherently evil from the very moment he was born aside, one must question the parenting of parents that fail to toilet train their child and simply allows them to play with their feces. Then, they basically just give the Child clay which helps combat their obsession with feces, replacing it with an obsession of creating an endless amount of humanoid clay figures and then breaking them all apart.

At this point of the manga, this kid isn't even anywhere near adulthood yet he's basically running full speed towards the goal line of becoming a serial killer.

In my opinion, in terms of the Child making progress on his "path", it's a little bit fast. Like it's hard to truly believe that there could be a child that is this inherently fucked up from birth itself. Never mind also adding in the Child's intelligence and awareness.

Though as unrealistic as it may actually be, I really thought this manga worked as giving a look into the mind of such a twisted mind. Like... I really, really, have to underline that this entire manga is fucked up. As a child, the Child witnesses like one of the assistant teachers of his special needs class being raped by some guy in a cabin in the woods and...

Then he just rapes her himself after the original rapist has already departed.

It's no surprise that the Child ends up starting his killings before he's even left elementary school. His killings aren't simple or subtle, either. They are brutal and sadistic to the point where while these children themselves were pretty messed up as well in their bullying ways, any possible "well at least they were bullies I guess" goes right out of the window when the killings are so sadistic that the original victim of the bullying kills herself because she can't stop the Child from killing other students but also she's far too paralyzed with fear to try and tell someone about it.

The Monster

I can't help but respect that this manga is completely unrepentant and doesn't hesitate even a moment to become even darker following the Child's original series of murders. Fourteen years old, and the Child has accumulated a following of younger children who can sense that there's something incredibly off about him, and begin to cling to him like moths surrounding a flickering light bulb.

One day, his followers proceed to bring a stray runaway to the Child who proceeds to give him food, stab him, rape him, and then finally kill him. He then cut off chunks of him and gave them to the children to eat, saying that it was holy communion.

I somewhat feel conflicted. Part of me feels that it's redundant to say this is fucked up and downright disturbing to read but... this manga genuinely is unsettling. Sure, the Child does apparently declare that he's gonna take revenge on the world the moment he's born, and sure, he is definitely without a doubt a horrible monster.

But when he was still a kid and killed his cat, he genuinely did apparently love the animal that he had cruelly slaughtered with his own hands. He even cried genuine tears over the cat's death and it's only when those tears ceased that he willfully made the decision to basically push any and all emotion and empathy from his mind and being. Then you as the reader are just there along for the ride as the Child continues to stray further into fucking darkness.

He witnesses an assistant teacher who tried to be close and friendly with him since he purposely isolated himself from the other "special" students get violently raped in the woods, and his reaction to this is curiosity and imitating the rapist himself after he leaves her already wounded and broken.

Then, when he starts to brutally kill bullies in his class that were forcing their one targeted victim to eat her own feces and etc, he reacts emotionless when she comes up to him and asks him to stop. The victim herself doesn't want to see anymore of her tormentors be grisly murdered and then their remains left where the other children can find them, but we as the readers, can see and know that the Child does not give two fucks about what she wants and is killing them just because he wants to.

Like as I continued descending into this manga, I couldn't help but think back to the earlier chapters when the Child muses back on when he created and then broke clay dolls. Haha, how cute! That was when I still wasn't capable of committing actual murders!

Then finally, when the Child is essentially at adulthood, he now more or less has a cult of boys younger than him who are not only entirely subservient to him, but also eagerly wish to commit murders with him. Then, when there's little response from society when he and his murder cult descend on the local vagrant populace, the Child just decides to move on from vagrants to random passerbys and describes the way they murder them like it's a matter of course.

But even then the Child feels like there's something missing, and then orders his followers to go and murder his parents, stating that he wants "absolute freedom." He claims that it wasn't that he was hesitant to do it himself, but because he wanted the rule of their murders to appear random to remain concrete. Yet as he witnessed his original home burning down, he actually sheds tears which he himself isn't sure of the reason for.

The Fall

To conclude, while I'm of course not gonna fully give away how exactly it ends, I do feel the need to say that if after everything, this manga hadn't ended with a "Fall", it wouldn't have... worked, in my opinion. After so much horribleness and following the Child from his very birth, it would have been a horribly crushing and pessimistic ending if the Child had continued without facing any punishment for his acts.

Speaking honestly, the way it ends and how the Child gets his comeuppance is perhaps the linchpin of why I think positively of this manga that is admittedly not a fun read at all. Mind you, of the images I included in this review, I held back on including the majority of the messed up stuff.

God's Child certainly works as a psychological horror, showcasing horrible human behavior and is almost entirely a look into the extremely twisted mind of this particularly fucked up individual who is almost inherently evil from birth. The horror beyond the surface level of how awful everything in the manga is and made me feel while reading it is just... thinking... what if a person like this ACTUALLY existed?

Overall, a 7 out of 10. If you're looking to make yourself feel bad or feel disgusted, God's Child is a pretty good choice.

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DoorSSBM
70/100
A shock filled allegory of the antichrist. cw- everything
Content Warning: almost everything you can imagine

Kami no Kodomo, or God's Child, begins with a birth from an anus into a toilet.

At this point I will say that this manga is very messed up and I would strongly recommend reader discretion as I will be talking about a lot of the content in it.

The Allegory

Already at the beginning we see a direct inverse to the story of Christ. The birth of God's Child (the main character in Kami no Komoda) is from the anus, the giver of waste and undesirable trash, into a toilet, an object designed to dispose of offensive matter. The next page explains that God's Child was conceived by a sperm that affixed itself to the stomach wall.

This is all the exact opposite from the story of Christ. Christ was conceived by an act of god termed the "immaculate conception" in which a child was placed into Mary's womb with no sexual acts whatsoever. The baby formed in the womb (the incubator of life), was born through the vagina (the giver of life), and then placed into a manger (a feeding trough, an object designed to distribute life sustaining matter). God's Child was conceived when a sperm was placed into a stomach, implying oral sex. Traditional penetrative sex is performed as an act of pleasure, but also as an act of creation. Oral sex is purely for pleasure and is therefore considered to be more perverse. This act created God's Child in the stomach (the place of decomposition), and then was born through the anus (the giver of waste), and placed into a toilet (an object that expunges unwanted material).

This is all in only the first 2 pages.

The allegorical inverse to Christ's story is not entirely parallel, but aligns frequently enough to be one of the more prominent motifs in the story.

The Commentary

Kami no Komodo employs a great deal of non-religious symbolism as well and does a poignant job of portraying the sociopathic nature of its protagonist. The story does not take a stance on if evil is nature or nurture, as it provides examples of both, but God's Child is deemed as pure evil from the beginning and instead shows how his influence grows through the story. I found the ending especially to be a symbolically rich commentary on how evil spreads through collective consciousness and can never be truly disposed of.

The Art

The art is considerably ugly. It goes for a much more abstract direction that prioritizes creating a feeling and an atmosphere over being pleasing or beautiful. That being said, the art serves the work exceptionally well. With the dark and horrific content in the manga, the art conveys the events accurately, but not in a way that would make such depraved content unconsumable.

The story content is shocking, gross, and downright evil, but the art is so abstract that it visually does not push itself beyond what I was able to endure.

Overall

Kami no Kamodo is disgusting and vile. I recommend it only if you are looking to feel gross, but also want to feel like the author has more to say than just shock value. Too many disgusting manga lack the subtext to be interesting beyond the emotional reaction it creates in the reader. Kami no Komodo is not one of those.

Kami no Komodo is effective at everything it sets out to do, but unfortunately does not provide substantial commentary or thematic analysis to elevate it beyond a competent, and symbolically intriguing, shock value piece of media.
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WeedNaruto
80/100
On its own, it's an alright horror single volume manga; for personal reasons, a Cubic horror masterclass
A short one-shot manga with a Picasso-esque art-style - the first-person told story of a sociopathic child that becomes a teenage leader of a cult made up of young boys that worship him for his ability to inflict death on others.

This is a unique case - objectively, this is not particularly good or unique. As other reviews pointed out, the plot is very simplistic, being just a sort of poetic first-person narration of the titular Child of God as he traces his childhood misbehavior, sociopathy, lack of connection with the world and his later crimes as an adolescent, a cult-leader and a pederast, where he leads a cult of beautiful young boys which interact sexually with him.

The characterization is rather shallow - the Child himself says he has done away with "such useless things as emotions and personality", although he clearly has emotions, as he cries on two occasions, both because of a death (both of which he committed). The Child is pure evil from the moment he is born. It is subtly implied that the Child is an unreliable narrator: as I said, he clearly has emotions, but states he does not, he says he was born out of his mother's asshole and grew in her stomach rather than her womb. As there is nothing supernatural as either the Child or the story as a whole, this seems to fit better with the fact that the Child is highly narcissistic and, as we see, has an anal fixation.

Despite these signs that the Child might be an unreliable narrator, nothing ever comes of it - no attention is pulled to it, nor is it a theme in any sense of the word as it is in, say, American Psycho, where Bateman is clearly delusional and that drives most of the plot.

I think it would have benefited if the Child had created a special bond with one of his beautiful boys, and if that relationship took an (even more) horrific turn, for then it would have a special impact on us - seeing how far above the Child is above feelings that he may tear even those he is close to apart. He does that to his family but he is not close to any of them.

Overall if I was to judge this "objectively" (no such thing, of course - I simply mean "on its own merits" rather than how I feel about it), I would give it a 6/10, for a simple if effective story and shallow characterization backed up by some incredible and unique abstract artwork. But this story hits so many of my personal fixations, manias, obsessions, etc, that I became immediately obsessed with it, down to the Child himself and his beautiful, cold, androgynous appearance. Indeed it has a death grip around thoughts of mine that are so niche and unusual and perfectly portrays them in its unique style, that it veered straight into "how was I not the one to write this" territory.

So, yeah. 6/10 if you want a level-headed assessment of it, 8/10 for very personal reasons.

Recommended if you share a fixation with death, meaningless cruelty, male androgyny and all of those things combined lmao.
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