Land of the Lustrous Review

Land of the Lustrous begins as an elegant, faintly comic fantasy and becomes something far stranger and sadder. The gems are immortal beings made of mineral, each with a hardness that decides their role, and when one is shattered the pieces can be reassembled, but the memories in the lost fragments are gone. Phos, the weakest and most useless of them, keeps losing parts and gaining replacements, and each change makes them more capable and less themselves.

Ichikawa's art is spare and luminous, all clean line and white space, and the fights with the lunarians are drawn as ballet. The story turns on Buddhist ideas about attachment and identity and follows them somewhere genuinely bleak, with a final act that abandons hope for something more like acceptance. The world is mysterious by design and some readers find its withholding frustrating. It is a beautiful, difficult, singular work.