透明人間の骨

TOUMEI NINGEN NO HONE

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
4
RELEASE
March 13, 2018
CHAPTERS
22

DESCRIPTION

At first glance, the family of Kinomiya Aya may seem quite ordinary: loving mother and father and a kind elder brother, however, appearances can be deceiving—Aya's father constantly beats her mother, scolds them for the slightest "transgressions," and commits other inappropriate deeds. Her brother spends all of his time selfishly ignoring what's right in front of him in favour of enjoying himself. Her mother is enduring it all for her children, and both mother and daughter live in constant fear of Aya's father. Because of all this, Aya envies ordinary families and the children who enjoy them.

One day, after witnessing a quarrel between father and mother turn violent, Aya experiences a great deal of stress, due to which she gains the ability to turn invisible. At first, the girl indulged in her superpowers, but eventually she makes a decision that will probably make her blame herself for the rest of her life...

CAST

Aya Kinomiya
Shiori Nakayama
Kana Minakami

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

unspecifieduser
100/100
A perfect character study. Emotional, poignant, profound, and expert in its technical use of the medium.
Toumen Ningen no Hone, or The Bones of an Invisible Person, is a masterpiece. I hope you can trust me on that, and read it instead of this review. Moreso than with other manga, certain things are impossible to talk about without lightly spoiling what you can expect. Things that are better to experience for yourself.

This is a manga about Kinomiya Aya, a girl with the power to turn invisible. About her journey through self-hatred, repentance, and connection. Most of all, this is a manga about guilt.

Though Aya has a paranatural ability, it’s not about her superpowered exploits. What she does with her ability is important, but not as important as what having it says about her. Instead, the narrative is grounded, focusing on personal drama, relationships, and Aya’s quiet introspection. She’s done things she regrets. She’s not sure if she could have done differently. She’s not sure if she deserves the life she leads.

Guilt hollows her out from the inside, yet she clings to it like a blanket. It lurks beneath the surface as she tries to maintain a normal life. Opposite desires clash within her, as she wants both forgiveness and punishment, privacy and infamy, and solitude and infamy. Every part of her life connects back to guilt, and guilt determines how she’ll try to live. Whether she deserves happiness, or whether guilt provides a backward reason to seek it. The story doesn’t force a perspective on whether her actions were right or wrong. The source of her struggle is not how the world may judge her, but how she judges herself. Her sense of justice is too strong to not apply it to herself.

The other two main characters are written nearly as well as Aya. Kana is a bubbly track team member, who lives next door and wants to make friends based off of that alone. Shiori is a quirky, musical loner, who takes an interest in Aya for the very things she wants to keep secret. Their outward personalities are distinct, and their hopes, desires, and attitudes are well fleshed-out. But it’s their relationships with Aya that reveal just how much they complement and contrast her. Kana’s positivity and extroversion is, from Aya’s perspective, an ideal that she can never reach, and thus a purity she should not sully. She also reflects Aya’s own simple desire to be wanted, and needs Aya to accept her. Yet Aya can’t be honest and open enough to let that happen — that’s where Shiori comes in, providing encouragement and inspiration for Aya to express herself to others. Yet with the cost of sharing the truths she’s afraid of.

Aya’s character arc, her relationships, and the theme of guilt, all add up to a story with a striking emotional core. She’s been through things no one should have to go through, made hard choices with no right answer, and come out of it a more sensitive person. One who, on top of the ordinary problems a high schooler faces, must grapple with her complex, painful relationship with guilt. It is easy to care for her, to relate to her, and to be on the edge of your seat as her journey unfolds. That journey is a poignant one. Just as Aya leads a normal life with her darkness hiding under the surface, much of the story has the tone of slice of life. The depression underneath casts an ever-present shadow. The drama is quiet, but powerful, pushing the characters through extreme emotions, and letting those emotions carry the story. The climax feels less like a fireworks show, and more like a cold winter night.

Both her daily life and the emotional drama are portrayed sincerely and authentically. Aya isn’t just shy, but socially isolated, and the way this causes her to think and act is realistic. So are the circumstances that caused her to be that way. Even more extreme situations, such as abuse, are treated with the same realism, and respect for how serious they are. Rather than milk uncomfortable topics for forced drama and shock value, it builds them properly and lets the drama naturally arise. Some of the most interesting moments come from exploration of complicated ideas that only work because they capture a realistic nuance. There’s a stretch near the end of the story that implicitly focuses on the realization that one made decisions based off of assumptions. That it’s easy to think you understand someone, but judge them only for the role they played in your own life. Rather than explain the theme, it shows it and lets it speak for itself.

The plot structure is simple and executed well. It maintains variety, shifting focus every few chapters, flowing naturally but never spending too much time in the same place. Every scene is relevant and important for exploring the characters or providing emotional contrast. Aya is introspective, but not passive. Her decisions push the story in radical ways. The pace is steady, but not slow. Always moving forward, but never rushing.

The key to that steady pacing is in how it’s drawn. The art is patient. Every action and reaction is shown in step-by-step detail. Instead of compressing events into fewer panels than they need, it gives every moment the space to breathe. The vision is never compromised for lack of pages. This doesn’t slow the pace, but lets the pace of the visuals perfectly sync with the pace of the plot. Dialogue ebbs and flows alongside the paneling, rather than cramming panels full with text. Every beat of the story gets a panel, whether a quiet pause to think, or a split-second reaction of shock. There are long sequences of entirely silent panels, slowly zooming in to build tension, or holding in place to let a sad moment linger.

The amount of space used on a manga page corresponds to importance, and this manga treats every moment as essential. The art and paneling are as thoughtful, patient, and poignant as the story they tell.

Aesthetically, the art is nice. The linework is sharp and clean, and the shading uses lots of hard contrast. Nothing is rough or sloppy. The page layouts are elegant, with balanced symmetry, impactful wide shots, and satisfying black-white balance. The character designs are simple but distinct with their faces drawn with expressive detail instead of exaggerated features. Aya is outwardly stoic, but the delicate touches on her eyes provide a subtle window into what she hides. There’s a moment in the first chapter where her blank, confused reaction to something ordinary speaks volumes of what she’s experienced. There’s a pair of moments where she frantically looks to the side, hoping in panic that the person she sees will do something. The second time, she looks at that same person with calm disdain, no longer expecting them to do a thing.

That moment is one of many conveyed without relying on text. The manga does use lots of narration, as Aya internally monologues her thoughts. But it’s kept from overexplaining the story or overpowering the visual storytelling. Whether closed in on the eyes, or pulled back to a lonely wide shot, the perspectives and framing are consistently used for meaning. It’s used for impactful imagery that tells implicit stories. A young girl hunched on a bench rather than the playground beside her. A boy happily reading while a fight rages behind him. A pair of emotionless eyes, unaffected by the misery they see. An invisible girl photographing the people before her.

The ending could be called inconclusive. It doesn’t show what happens next, and to some readers that won’t be enough. To others, it already showed what mattered most. Aya’s arc completes, and it finishes on a beautiful moment. A moment that’s especially satisfying if you’ve noticed a certain trend in her behavior. What happens after that, you can decide.

Guilt is the primary idea, but the events of the story demonstrate a simpler, truer theme. You can’t make progress if you hide parts of yourself from those who love you, or don’t attempt to understand them. The world may not be as difficult as it seems, if you’re willing to communicate.
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Juliko25
80/100
Quiet, poignant, and surprisingly wholesome, a manga that tackles child abuse with sensitivity and grace.
Huh, now this is a manga I didn't expect to find. I just randomly stumbled across Bones of an Invisible Human while scrolling through AniList and found that it had a complete English scanlation. I decided to sit down and read it, thinking I'd kill some time...and read the whole thing in almost one sitting. Not gonna lie, this is actually a surprisingly heartfelt manga that tackles the subject of child abuse and patricide with sensitivity and nuance. The story centers on a young girl named Aya Kinomiya, whose life isn't exactly the best. Her father rules the household with an iron fist and frequently hits her mother. At one point, Aya wishes she could just be invisible...and to her surprise, her wish is granted! Aya somehow gains the ability to turn invisible, and she wastes no time putting it to use. When she gets older, she does the unthinkable: While invisible, she stabs her father in the middle of the street, murdering him in retaliation for all that he put her family through. But the deed brings her no respite, and guilt weighs heavy on her as she starts high school, convinced that she has no right to live a normal life. She contemplates turning herself in, but when some new friends enter her life, she begins putting it off more and more...

If you're worried that the girls on the covers being nude means that there'll be scenes showing the underaged female main characters nude in this manga, don't worry. Other than the covers, which never go past the top of the girls' chests, there's no nudity, sexualization, or ecchi scenes in this manga. I read the whole thing and checked. Just wanted to throw that out there. Anyway, onto the review! For a story that starts out with a murder, Bones of an Invisible Human is surprisingly grounded in its narrative approach. A lot of the manga focuses on just Aya, the time she spends at school, and the friends she makes. This isn't a story where Aya uses her powers willy-nilly and does whatever the heck she wants. But I think the story's more grounded approach here works, because it spends a lot of time characterizing Aya, fleshing her out, and focusing on her life after she does the deed and how it affects her, allowing the audience to care about her and see her not simply a criminal, but a normal, desperate teenage girl who had to make hard choices with no right answer, who's been through things no child should ever have to go through. The drama is always quiet and never leans into emo territory.

Because of the author's choice to make the narrative more grounded and down-to-earth, Aya as a main character really carries the story on her back. Yes, she did something horrible out of desperation, with the story making it clear that her bad home life has resulted in her being constantly in survival mode. She's constantly grappling with conflicting desires or whether she even deserves happiness or normalcy in light of what she did. But the story has her slowly, gradually change over the course of the manga, and how experiencing a life with guilt constantly hanging over her like a shadow, alongside navigating it with the support of her new friends, helps her evolve and change her perspective, making her a much more complex character. My only complaint is that I wish the other characters, such as Aya's family and friends, had received this treatment as well. As much as I like Kana and Shiori and the roles they play in Aya's life, they don't really have much to them other than their primary character traits, and I would have liked to learn their backstories or why they turned out the way they did. Even Aya's family doesn't have much to them, especially her older brother, who doesn't even so much as talk until the penultimate chapter.

Going back to the manga's reliance on subtlety and grace over exaggerated melodrama, even the art reflects the series' grounded nature. The art itself has a slight ruggedness to it that sells the kind of story its telling, though the linework itself is sharp and clean, with a lot of hard contrast in the shading. The character designs are deliberately simple, leaning far more on the realistic side of things, though the mangaka makes up for this by having the characters be much more expressive in subtle things like eye movements and posture, using those to communicate the characters' emotions and show us what they're feeling. For example, when Aya is invited to a friend's house, she asks said friend if it's okay for them to play video games with the friend's dad, and her friend says yes. Aya has a blank, confused expression on her face, which shows that something completely ordinary to us speaks volumes of what she was made to experience at the hands of her own father. I will say, Jun Ogino is a master at showing over telling, along with using panels that have no dialogue at all to great effect. Since the manga is only four volumes long, it's a breeze to read through, with the steady, deliberate pacing moving the story forward without rushing things.

One thing I'm sure that some readers will take issue with is the ending, where it stops right before a certain event that Aya talks about. Some may call it inconclusive, and it doesn't show what happens next. I personally had no problem with it because with how short Bones of an Invisible Human is, I didn't think that event would be the focus, and it's clear the manga is much more about Aya's arc than having a conclusive ending. To quote another review, the manga feels less like a fireworks show and more like a cold, winter night, even down to the ending, and considering the nature of the story, I think that's fitting. Some time ago, I read another manga about a girl contemplating killing her abusive father called May My Father Die Soon, only it doesn't have supernatural powers and the MC is both physically and sexually abused by her father. That manga doesn't have a full English scanlation yet, and from what I've read, while I respect what its trying to do, parts of it come off as pretty tasteless because of the fetishy, almost Male Gaze-y way the mangaka chose to draw the scenes where the MC is sexually abused by her father. Between that and Bones of an Invisible Human, I find I like Bones a little better by virtue of the fact that it treats the subjects of dometic and child abuse with more tact and sensitivity without the tasteless elements that May My Father Die Soon has.

Bones of an Invisible Human is a quiet, poignant, and surprisingly wholesome manga about a girl coming to terms with the decision she made and how it affects her life afterward. While it has its issues, I still found it an intriguing, thought provoking read, and I recommend it for those who like their crime stories to be more grounded and tackle sensitive issues with sensitivity and grace.

Update, 5/27/2023: Okay, I found out I was wrong about one thing. Some time after the manga ended, Jun Ogino wrote an extra chapter that's exclusive to the tankobon, called chapter 22.5. Said chapter shows Aya and Kana having sex in explicit detail (Though not at the level of hentai). Apparently, Jun Ogino wanted to have Aya and Kana be in a lesbian relationship, but the comic imprint that was publishing Bones was against him showing openly LGBT characters for some reason. Ogino would get around this by publishing this extra chapter outside of the manga's imprint when the tankobons were released. The chapter itself can easily be skipped if you're not into that, but I'm personally glad Ogino found a way to stick to his original vision. Plus, I will say I am SO happy that Aya and Kana's sexual encounter is explicitly mentioned to be consensual on both ends. If it wasn't, I would have thrown a shitfit and rated this manga a LOT lower.
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