In advance of J-Novel Club’s release of Otherside Picnic, the sci-fi light novel by Miyazawa Iori, I picked up the manga for the story. In Urusekai Picnic, Volume 1 (裏世界ピクニック ) the manga adaptation of the story introduces us to Sora and Toriko, two women who have access to the “Otherside,” a world populated by weirdly wiggly aliens and strange phenomenon.

The manga begins as Sorao is dying. She has no idea why she is or how she got here, but here she is, submerged in some kind of liquid. She remembers finding a door to the “otherside” and seeing one of the wiggly aliens. She is rescued by another human, a woman of apparently about her age, Toriko.  Toriko tells Sorao that she’s hunting…and after she shoots an alien, it turns out that what she is hunting is the chrome cubes they leave behind along with their physical form.

Sorao almost loses her life once again, as the aliens grow inside her like a plant. Although Toriko saves her, Sorao finds that 1) she can kind of hear them now and 2) her one eye has turned blue,

We learn that Toriko is also hunting…a friend, Satsuki. It is pretty clear to Sorao and us that Satsuki was more than a friend to Toriko. What strikes Sorao as odd is her own reaction to that. She hasn’t put a name to it by the end of Volume 1…but I can.

The two women meet a man who has lost his wife and clearly some measure of his sanity on this Otherside. The guy is not with us long, but his disappearance is the catalyst for learning that Sorao’s alien eye can also see alien tech for what it is, which allows her, for onc,e to save Toriko.

I found it a little hard to engage with the book at first. Not because it lacks context (which it does) but because it lacked any kind of character development. Sorao is a blank. We know almost nothing about her when we meet her and by the time the first volume is over, we know about the same amount of nothing. The same is true for Toriko, although we can see that she is driven to find her – probably – lover. The two women are more interesting together because neither appears fearfulnor hesitant. When Toriko shows up at her school and asks Sorao to hunt with her, Sorao is right on it. If there’s a single specific quality of the characters that appeals to me, it’s that.

The art by shirakaba is conventional, but solid. All in all this looks and feels exactly like  what it is said to be – a science fiction manga with, one presumes, a Yuri plot somewhere in there.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Characters – 7
Story – 8
Service – 1, maybe
Yuri  – 2 by implication so far

Overall – 7

I have absolutely no idea where the story will go, but I guess I’ve signed up to go hunting with Toriko and Sorao. ^_^