Fool Night
For the last few months, I’ve been having trouble reading books due to migraine. This happens for stretches of time, and I need to just wait for my brain patterns to shift. In the meantime, I’ve been checking out some comics and manga instead.
Fool Night is an ongoing seinen manga (i.e. aimed at adult men, as opposed to shounen manga for boys, which gets a lot more attention in the west) that’s available to read on the Viz manga app…although, annoyingly, a huge chunk of the middle chapters aren’t online for some reason, meaning you’ll need to seek out fan translations for them.
In a far future that looks a lot like our present, the sky is covered in a pall of darkness and as a result traditional vegetation can no longer grow, which is of course bad because oh no oxygen. And also oh no eternal winter, but the oxygen thing is the real problem. Luckily, a scientific solution has been found: transfloration, a process whereby seeds are implanted into human bodies so they can feed on the person’s soul. During a process of roughly two years, the transflorated person will slowly turn into a plant in a very Last of Us-esque process, retaining their consciousness even after they’ve fully plantified for an indeterminate amount of time.
In exchange for this, they receive a stipend of two million yen from the government, which they can use to live large during their final years of humanity (or, more commonly, pay off the crushing debt that most people in this society live under and see to it that their dependants are cared for after they’re gone). The manga’s protagonist is Toshiro, a broke sad-sack who’s forced to work a shitty job in order to pay for his mentally ill mother’s treatment, without which she turns violent and tries to murder him.
No, the story doesn’t get less depressing from there. Just in case you’re wondering.
Normally transfloration is only available to people with terminal illnesses, but thanks to one of the employees at the transfloration bureau being Toshiro’s old childhood friend, he manages to get himself flowerified in exchange for that sweet payout…which is then promptly stolen after he gets mugged in an alleyway, setting him right back to square one, only now with a looming countdown over his head. All is not lost however, as it turns out Toshiro has the ability to hear the thoughts of transflorated plants, a skill that the government department his childhood friend works at finds very useful. And when a transflora serial killer starts murdering people, using sick-ass plant powers that no one’s ever seen before, Toshiro ends up right in the middle of a conflict that could decide his world’s future.
After all that set-up, you might be wondering exactly what kind of story Fool Night is. For a while I was wondering that, too. In its opening chapters the plot goes through a few permutations, starting out as a sci-fi drama, then seeming like it’s going to engage in episodic adventures where Toshiro uses his powers to track down people’s missing plant relatives, and then the serial killer plotline kicks in and the manga veers into the Akira-esque tale of mad science and politics that it seems like it’s going to stay in from here on out. I don’t know if this was planned from the start or if the zig-zagging was the result of the manga struggling to find its feet (it seems like it’s about to head into a super-powered action direction at one point, which is often the sign of a manga in trouble), but either way I’m glad that it eventually picked a lane to stay in. Once it settles down, it turns into a political/bureaucratic thriller worthy of Ghost In The Shell or, well, the aforementioned Akira.
The transfloration thing might trip up people who are expecting a more hard sci-fi story—absolutely no attempt is made at plausibility, and the later permutations the idea goes through might as well be magic—but I recommend not letting that stop you. This is obviously the sort of thing you’re supposed to treat more as a metaphor than a literal plot point.
What is it a metaphor for?
CAPITALISM, BABY.
Or to put it another way, I found out this manga exists because someone on an anarchist sub-reddit—the only good kind of leftist sub-reddit—recommended it as an example of “based manga”. So, that should tell you a lot about the kinds of themes we’re dealing with here.
Fool Night takes an approach to dystopian storytelling that personally resonates with me a lot, in that it kind of isn’t a dystopian story. At least, not the kind of dystopia that people tend to think of these days. This isn’t a totalitarian society where democracy has been scrapped and jack-booted secret police are spiriting people away in the night. The oppressive institutions that govern the setting were installed via democratic elections, and several major plot threads hinge on the fact that they can absolutely be uninstalled if people vote for it. Apart from the whole eternal night thing, the problems that people in this world deal with are just heightened versions of the problems that people today deal with… and sometimes not even all that heightened.
Poverty is the same as it’s always been, but now a much higher percentage of people, even in wealthy countries, suffers from it. The horrible factory job that Toshiro works at in the beginning doesn’t seem all that different from what the likes of Foxconn subjects its employees to, it’s just that, again, a much greater proportion of people are forced to work under those conditions in Fool Night’s world than our own, the middle class having seemingly been all but erased. The predatory for-profit healthcare system that demands impossible sums of money from people in exchange for lifesaving care is…well, America, basically.
In a more general sense, the eternal night and the struggle for survival that it’s caused has hardened people, making all of their relationships with others colder. Whether it’s employers and employees, government and its people, the way adults treat children, or even just interactions between friends, this is a world where people have little empathy to give to others, and the few that do often find themselves stymied by the necessary self-interest of survival when they attempt to act on it.
One thread that’s woven throughout the entire story is the mistreatment of children. All of the characters whose backstories we’ve been privy to suffered some level of physical abuse at the hands of adults, to such an extent that it seems far more prevalent in this world than it generally is in our own, and possibly more tolerated by society. And the main plot ends up revolving around a particularly nasty way that the transflora system and rampant poverty combine to exploit children in particular. The manga has yet to make any grand statement out of all of this; it’s just a constant, silent condemnation of this world and its mindset that all of this is allowed to happen, often with the full knowledge of apathetic authorities who either don’t care, are actively profiting off of it, or who see it as an acceptable trade-off to prevent something even worse from happening.
The fact that Toshiro’s world lacks empathy really seems to be its cardinal sin as far as the manga is concerned. Via his plant powers, which quickly extend beyond just hearing soulflora and allow him to communicate with them and even experience their memories, Toshiro gains a level of empathy not available to others, and one of the more fascinating strands of storytelling so far is when the manga explores how this has set him apart from the rest of society.
You see this most clearly in an arc-ending confrontation between Toshiro and the soulfora serial killer known as Ivy. After discovering Ivy’s identity and learning, via direct memory experience, what led them to do the things they’re doing, Toshiro finds himself torn. On one hand is the societal, moral principle that Ivy has committed terrible crimes and must be punished for them, and on the other is Toshiro’s internal, emotional conviction that he feels really bad for Ivy and just kind of doesn’t want to do that. He knows he’s supposed to weigh the innocent lives Ivy took more than the monstrous circumstances that caused Ivy to take those lives…but he has trouble actually convincing himself to do so, especially when he’s actually in a position to decide Ivy’s fate.
It’s a really interesting examination of what happens when a person is forced to functionally enact the societal norms that they’ve just passively absorbed up to this point, and crucially, it doesn’t direct the reader down any particular conclusion. If you think Toshiro is a useless bleeding heart whose abilities have erased his objectivity, that reading is absolutely supported. If you think he’s onto something and that the ultimate blame for Ivy’s murders should be laid at the feet of the systems and people that made them, that’s also supported. The manga quite cleverly makes Toshiro’s hang-up on this issue much more about a gut emotional feeling than any particularly thought-out philosophy or ideology, which means the reader is free to use the conflict as a mirror for their own ideas.
Which is not to say that Fool Night shies away from stating its own moral or ethical case. At times it’s not afraid to present two sides of an issue and come to the conclusion that while yes, the topic is complex, there is absolutely a correct and an incorrect answer.
Case in point: early on, Toshiro is contracted by Sumi Matsuno, a famous pianist, to find the soulfora her father turned into after undergoing transfloration. Supposedly this is so it can be replanted, but she confesses to Toshiro that she actually wants to burn it, something that’s illegal since soulflora are property of the state. She wants to do this because her father was a huge asshole who forced her to learn the piano, then abused her horribly whenever she made the slightest mistake. This has left her deeply traumatised as an adult, unable to take any joy in being a pianist even as it’s given her a level of wealth that most people in her world can’t dream of.
Stories about people confronting their abusive parents have this depressing tendency to end up redeeming the parent in some way. I don’t think that’s because writers are trying to forgive child abuse, I think it’s because a) most writers are themselves parents or want to be parents and so they emphathise more with that side of the equation and b) a lot of people think both sides-ing every issue they write about makes them smarter and more nuanced (we can call this the Ken Levine Effect).
Fool Night seems like it’s going in this direction at first. Sumi finds that she’s unable to burn her father’s soulflora after remembering all of the times he was kind and loving towards her, and when Toshiro communicates with plant-Dad he says he was only so hard on her because he wanted to ensure she had a future in the dystopian hellscape they live in. Toshiro makes him confront the memories of the pain he inflicted in Sumi, and he finally apologises to her. I can absolutely see how a lot of stories would leave it there: what he did was wrong, and Sumi is never going to fully forgive him, but the apology has allowed her to get past her trauma, so she decides to leave his soulflora intact so he can remain a conscious being for as long as possible.
But Fool Night says actually, that’s bullshit. Yes, Sumi’s father was good to her most of the time, and on some level she will always feel grateful to him for giving her the skills that have made her wealthy and secure as an adult…but that doesn’t undo the harm he inflicted on her. Toshiro himself shoots down the “I was just trying to protect you” argument as cowardice after experiencing tree-Dad’s memories of beating Sumi and realising how utterly lacking in empathy he was towards her. Even after Sumi’s dad finally acknowledges what he did and apologises, she still doesn’t forgive him. I won’t spoil what she ultimately decides to do, but the story very much comes down on Sumi’s side over her father’s.
By the way, you may have picked up on this given how many times in this review I’ve brought up child abuse, but just in case: this manga gets pretty fucking dark. This is seen most clearly in a running sub-plot about a teenage girl whose life goes completely and tragically to shit after her father struggles to pay for her high school entrance fees. As soon as the character is introduced you know something bad is going to happen to her, if only because by this point we’ve been shown repeatedly that this is a world where bad things often happen to children, but the extended trauma conga line that ensues is one of the few times I’ve ever found a manga genuinely upsetting.
(As of the current chapter she’s in a more positive situation, but I have a feeling this is just the author loading a bullet into Checkov’s gun for later).
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not an unrelenting grimfest or anything. There are a lot of quite funny moments of comedy, as well as light-hearted scenes where the characters are playing board games or engaging in other down-time activities. But it is definitely not afraid to engage with unsettling or distressing topics, so be warned.
In addition to the thorny (ha ha get it, plants) subject matter, one element I can see being a sticking point for some people is Toshiro. He’s an interesting and relatable character, someone whose life has withered on the vine (that one was an accident) and who feels that he never managed to become a “real adult” and blames himself for this, even though from the reader’s perspective it’s pretty clear that the things holding him back aren’t actually his fault.
One detail I particularly like in this regard is how both Toshiro and Yomiko, his childhood friend who gets him the job at the transfloration bureau, went to the same school as children, but she came from a wealthy family and had an attentive (if overly strict) mother while Toshiro lived in poverty and was raised by a mother with untreated mental health issues. It’s a nice rebuttal of the “opportunity” mindset you often get from liberals who are insufficiently based, which ignores the fact that just giving someone access to, say, education might not be enough to make a difference if their home life is also a wreck or they’re dealing with other things that negate the apparent advantages they have. Even though they had access to the same basic opportunities, as a result of other factors beyond their control, Toshiro and Yomiko in adulthood have ended up in very different situations in life, and that is genuinely not Toshiro’s fault.
All of this is a preamble to say that while Toshiro is too hard on himself, and the story is fully aware of this, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s not always easy to root (aaayyyyy) for. In particular, he makes a lot of incredibly bad decisions, which puts both himself and others in danger repeatedly. He’s a person who feels very strongly about things and tends to get majorly in his own head about those feelings, which is perhaps not necessarily bad… except when Toshiro gets in his own head about something, he tends to convince himself that he needs to take drastic action without consulting anyone else first, or even just stopping to consider whether, say, stealing a gun from a government agent and trying to single-handedly take down a serial killer who’s murdered dozens of people is actually a good idea. You spend a lot of time in Fool Night watching Toshiro go tearing off on these wild plans, driven by impulses that are often difficult to parse as an outsider even when you have access to his inner thoughts. If you’re the sort of person who absolutely must have “likable” protagonists in fiction, you might struggle with this.
Of course, it helps that the story itself isn’t fully on Toshiro’s side either a lot of the time. Yomiko does have a habit of blaming everyone but Toshiro for his bad decisions and lamenting about how mean and unfair the world is being towards him, but she’s in the middle of this “I need to save someone from the consequences of the system I’ve helped create in order to alleviate my guilt” mindset, so I think we’re meant to read that as her personal baggage rather than any sort of objective analysis. Again, this might trip you up if you can’t stand fictional characters making illogical decisions.
One element that I, personally, am still a little wary of is the manga’s treatment of politics. By which I mean actual electoral politics, not like “politics” the way bozos on Youtube mean it where something becomes political if they see a brown person. There’s a pretty involved plotline involving an opposition party that’s trying to dismantle the entire transfloration system and replace it with alternative solutions to the oxygen crisis (whether or not those solutions are actually viable isn’t clear). Predictably, this movement turns out to be a huge scam where they’re helping to create the very thing that’s turning people against the transfloration bureau as part of a false flag operation, and their leader is a ruthless dude who shoots people in the head if they don’t agree to go along with him (although he does appear to be sincere in his publicly-stated convictions, as opposed to secretly being in it for power or money).
On one hand, my own personal stance isn’t one that tends to put much stock in official political parties of any kind as instruments of positive change (again, I found out about this manga on a forum for anarchists), so I don’t necessarily have an issue with it if the story ends up deciding that politics as a whole is rotten. On the other hand, I’m not one of those leftists who thinks you should be excommunicated by Nestor Makhno if you vote in an election (I do it regularly myself). Harm reduction is a real thing, voting can bring about positive change if enough people vote the right way. The attitude of “the current political system is shit and all the alternatives are scams so fuck everything” is maybe cathartic to indulge in every now and again as a thought exercise, but it’s not a viable political strategy if you care about actually helping people. I would be disappointed if Fool Night ends up engaging in this sort of political nihilism by casting every attempt at change, whether it comes from sanctioned political parties or grass-roots movements or a full-on insurrection, as corrupt, misguided, compromised or too chaotic and violence-prone to succeed.
I don’t think it’s going to do that, because so far this is a story that’s firmly interested in the little people, either because that reflects the author’s politics or just because they realise that in any story about a hierarchical system, the most interesting characters are found near the bottom (I’m looking at you, epic fantasy). But I do have misgivings, especially with the way the public is depicted as a pack of gullible rubes easily swayed by lies, which…yes, that is very believable in out current conspiratocracy where you can apparently convince millions of people to believe in total bullshit with distressing ease, but I would like an acknowledgement at some point that a bottom-up movement of ordinary people is capable of being effective and responsible. There’s plenty of examples, it’s happened before! We don’t need to keep perpetuating this idea that if you get more than a dozen people together without a big strong authority figure keeping a close eye on them, they’ll turn into a violent mob or get hijacked by the first opportunist who comes along.
Political griping aside, another issue I have with the manga is its action scenes. These don’t come up often–it isn’t an action spectacle–but when they do they have some amazing choreography. It’s a lot of Jason Borne-esque super-spy stuff with people using improvised weaponry and throwing each other through furniture, and most of it seems like it would be amazing in live action or animation.
But unfortunately they are currently not rendered in live action or animation, they’re rendered as manga, and in their current form they’re often confusing to parse, with lots of small close-up panels of someone’s hand donking against an object or a reaction frame to something that wasn’t actually depicted on the page. The individual beats of the action that we’re seeing look cool, but there’s rarely a sense of movement to link those beats together. As a result, I spent a lot of time during fight scenes staring at the page and trying to figure out what’s supposed to be happening.
Apart from these relatively minor flaws, Fool Night is a mature seinen manga that I can recommend wholeheartedly, assuming you aren’t put off by the heavy subject matter. It’s just a shame the whole thing isn’t available to easily read through legal channels.