In my review of Volume 1, I expressed a certain level of awe (and revulsion) about the predominance of hair in the narrative. To be honest, I did not think that hair could play more of a role than it did.

I was wrong.

In Mayu, Matou, Volume 2 ( 繭、纏う) hair does indeed play a bigger role than it did in the first volume. It even gets a speaking part. I am not kidding.

The characters also get significant development, and we get a few more characters. At the end of Volume 2 we have a far, far more complicated scenario that we did in Volume 1, which was more of a pastiche of a elite girl’s school with Yuri and a hair fetish. Volume 2 is setting up to become a game of chess in which only one side has a queen, the king has no interest in the game and a pawn is well on her way to queened, with a bishop who isn’t sure who she serves – the soon-to-be-queen or the king. And we have another pawn who serves the queen without conflict. The chessboard is filling up; the game is likely to begin next volume.

The entirety of this series is inexpressibly weird, and creepy and interesting and beautiful and off-putting. I find myself rooting for Yokozawa because despite the mystery cult-like indoctrination (in this case, in honor of the Norns) and behavior and at this school, she seems pretty grounded.

While we get to see the school from more students’ perspectives in this volume than in Volume 1, we’re still mostly looking at it through the curtain of hair. Hair has taken over the pages once again, but there may be a plot outside the hair, and not just about freedom and fate, but also about power. I find that despite my occasional desire to gag at all the hair…I am here for whatever confrontation we are moving towards.

Ratings:

Art – Hair
Characters – Both queens and the bishop are an 8
Story – Hair
Service – Absolutely still hair
Yuri – 7, a love triangle, a chess game and hair

Overall – 8 I wonder if the creator is as surprised as I am to find that there’s an actual story here. (This was rhetorical, no explanations required.)

This series is available in English as Cocoon, Entwined, Volume 1 from Yen Press. Volume 2 will be released in Spring 2020.

Cleaning duty still must be a nightmare.