Hate no Shoutsuushin / Correspondence from the End of the Universe by Menota

I guess I was in a quirky mood when I was at Barnes & Noble, because the other manga I picked up was Hate no Shoutsuushin / Correspondence from the End of the Universe. It’s even weirder than Box of Light? But, the characters got me, and so now I’m hooked.

SPOILERS

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This manga actually kind of hard to explain because it requires the reader to buy into a very ridiculous premise. Namely, that the Clockwork God (the idea of a god that set creation in motion, like a clock, and then wandered off to do something else) is real and there is a department of creation that has taken over building new planets in his (or, I guess, His) absence.

Weirder still, the people who work at this star/planet laboratory are conscripted.

They’re just going about their lives, until one day, they are dematerialized and rematerialized at Mosly Station, where they’re assigned for ten years, like it or not, no escaping. In fact, we discover that our hero’s predecessor was abducted on her wedding night and spent several of her first days just sobbing and weeping.

!!

Our hero is a young Russian (why Russian? I have no idea, except that maybe it was easier to slot a Russian into a world where that implies the existence of the Christian god.) Marko has felt haunted by aliens from the age of eleven when he was struck by a freak bolt of lightning on a clear, sunny day. He has a kind of Harry Potter scar that he’s always tried to hide.

At any rate, Marko is now graduating college and is ready to set off into the world with the love of his life (whose gender and name we never know–the only thing we know about them is that they’re older than Marko, have been a childhood friend, and never learned to swim). Suddenly, just as he’s made plans to meet his lover and propose marriage, he’s dematerialized.

And rematerializes beyond the stars to this star/planet factory at the end of the universe.

Honestly, it only gets progressively weirder from there?

All of Marko’s colleagues are aliens. There’s a girl with slug hands, there’s the typical red oni buddy, who can transform his hands into giant lobster claws; and the Director who has to always wear a mask because otherwise he transforms into whatever the person looking at him is most afraid of.

Yet, despite the very oddball cast and even stranger premise, Marko is a compelling hero because he’s incredibly kindhearted. On his first outing, the Director (who isn’t really in charge, but he’s from a planet has longer years, and so his “ten year sentence” passes in a hundred years, to most of the other people’s ten) and Marko end up on a spaceship in need of repairs and first aid. Even though Marko initially hoped to escape to Earth by stowing away on this ship, he ends up adopting a child whose twin gets killed in an accident.

The relationship between Marko and his adoptee is incredibly heartwarming. Marko lost his parents in a car accident and so he and this small child alien, Muu, relate a lot on the topic of grief in ways that, given how stupid the premise is, are really poignant, like, seriously made me tear up kind of poignant.

Oof. And, that’s not even the hardest scene with Muu.

At this point, I was kind of all in. There are at least five volumes out there, all available from Seven Seas. I highly recommend this one? I loved the art and found the story weird, but deeply compelling.

This one is a winner.