Homunculus Review

Nakoshi is living in his car outside a Tokyo park when a medical student offers him money to undergo trepanation, and afterwards he perceives strangers as distorted figures that render their damage as form. The premise is excellent and the first several volumes are close to essential. Each subject Nakoshi meets is a small, precise case study, the visual metaphors are invented rather than borrowed, and Yamamoto's draftsmanship keeps the transformations legible and unpleasant within the same panel.

Then the book turns inward. Once the question becomes what Nakoshi himself is hiding, the plotting loses its discipline, the sexual material becomes repetitive rather than confrontational, and the final volumes reach for an explanation the reader has to accept largely on assertion. It is worth reading anyway, because nothing else works this territory with the same seriousness, and the love hotel sequence and the arc with the schoolgirl are as good as the genre gets. Go in expecting a book that cannot land what it opened. Its reputation as a flawed near classic is accurate, and it is still a near classic.