Shibuya Goldfish Volume 1 Review

Hello everyone and welcome back to Tiro Finale! Ever since we got the ball rolling with Why The Hell Are You Here, Teacher?!, the writing team on Tiro Finale has fully embraced the idea of publishing manga reviews. Part of that initiative includes the Manga Exchange Program, where we are each assigned one manga at random, for better or worse, to review. The beginning of the week saw Lance's review of something light in Delicious in Dungeon. If you have not read that review already, I recommend you check that out before moving onto the heavier stuff that is the subject of today's review.

For my selection, I was randomly assigned Hiroumi Aoi's Shibuya Goldfish, a horror manga which on the surface is very much like Junji Ito's Gyo. Take a deeper look though and you will find that the two are actually rather dissimilar despite being horror genre manga based on killer aquatic animals. The title Shibuya Goldfish had appeared on my radar several times whilst browsing Book Walker where I certainly did consider reading it. As they say, no time like the present, as I jump headlong into unknown territory.

The first volume of Shibuya Goldfish centers around Tsukiyoda Hajime, a high school student and aspiring filmmaker. He finds himself at lost for inspiration while trying to complete his latest film project and after several people, friends and strangers alike, turning down his plea for help, finds himself in one of the last places he would normally expect a person like himself to be.

As the title suggests, much if not all of the manga takes place in the busy Tokyo district of Shibuya. With all of the hustle and bustle of the metropolitan citizens and the towering malls and office buildings within the iconic district, Shibuya certainly has all the makings of the perfect setting for a manga such as this. It certainly helps that the manga has several large two page set pieces which help to capture the essence of an iconic location such as Shibuya. I would have no doubt been hooked onto this manga from the get go if it were not from one rather jarring issue, the consistency of the artwork.

While the cityscape may be richly detailed, the human characters themselves are largely uninspiring including Hajime himself. This is further compounded by many of the backgrounds being overly populated by either speech bubbles or just straight up blank environments. Even when there is a background, they are simply generic and uninspiring backgrounds.While it is a fairly common practice in manga, one of my pet peeves are blank backgrounds and there are a fair few of them in Shibuya Goldfish especially when the characters are in dialogue.

Oddly enough, this is immediately contrasted by the arrival of the titular Shibuya Goldfish. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that they are the very subject of the title, the goldfish themselves are very well drawn and detailed. Moreover, each one looks distinctively different from another with varying physical attributes and surface patterns. At a glance, these goldfish look very much like the ones you would find in an aquarium. But look a little closer and you would be able to make out oddly eerie features that never fail to make one feel uneasy. Almost like the Titans in Attack on Titans, these goldfish look positively murderous despite appearing largely apathetic.

The interesting premise aside, much of Shibuya Goldfish's pitfalls come in the form of its inconsistency, both in its artwork and story telling. There are undoubtedly moments of brilliance in its art exemplified by the impressive two-page spread artworks. Yet, there are also far too many scenes in the manga which either lack details or look rather hastily drawn. Scenes where the goldfish or humans are appearing to be moving quickly suffer the most as their proportions become rather distorted with rather rough lines compared to the mangaka's usual clean lines.

Earlier I mentioned several of the large two page set pieces that the mangaka illustrates of Shibuya which really help to set the tone and atmosphere of the manga. This factor is only amplified with the appearance of the antagonistic goldfish who provide an added layer of intricacy to the environment. Unfortunately, a lot of these scenes do not hold up to closer scrutiny. Upon further inspection, you would easily notice that there are many areas, aside from the buildings, which are actually very sparse in details. Take for example the group of people standing outside the building who are just illustrated as silhouettes.

It may be easy to easily dismiss the lack of detail in smaller objects as being a limitation of drawing but, that too is dis-proven a few pages later with perhaps one of the most excellent set pieces in the entire manga. Tsukiyoda Hajime overlooking the skyline of Shibuya with the goldfish seemingly floating as if swimming through air, is easily one of the best panels of the entire manga.

Where the static wide shots are highly detailed and inspire a sense of awe due to the long viewing distances, the scenes in motion, unfortunately, lack the same degree of impact as the static ones. Despite the heavy usage of motion lines and motion blur to invoke the illusion of motion, many of these scenes lack the kinetic energy and impact that it is trying to portray. The object density does not help the situation either where the reciprocating motion of one subject affecting another, in this case the goldfish, comes of as feeling rather disconnected.

Object density plays a huge role in Shibuya Goldfish with many of the larger gold fish filling up the city skylines whereas the smaller ones fill the indoor areas. The illustrations of the smaller goldfish are particularly impressive especially when you condier the number of them that have to be drawn. I would imagine if this was done in an anime, it would be a real nightmare to animate.

Where named characters are drawn in fairly good detail, the side ones are completely dismissed with low and inconsistent levels of details. In fact, it would not be unfair to say that the background characters are poorly drawn. This would be less of an issue in the comedy or slice of life genre but, in horror manga such as Shibuya Goldfish, these poorly drawn side characters fail to illustrate the gravity of human drama unfolding at present. Referencing Attack on Titan once more, that series has proven that good art is not necessary in framing the helplessness and despair that the genre presents. The end result is a reading experience which feels rather disconnected even when you are presented with the sight of goldfish chomping on human remains, as gruesome as that may sound.

Much of the review so far has focused on Shibuya Goldfish's artwork and I have touched little about the story aspects thus far and rightfully so. Up until the end of the volume, many of the characters lack much depth and personality with any effort to expand upon their backstory often feeling either too generic or superficial. It is not for the lack of trying either as the mangaka frequently utilizes flashbacks as exposition points to explore the humanity or conviction of each character.

Nevertheless, I will concede that the manga does indeed have some properly edge-of-your-seat moments. It is a pity then that most of these scenes only appear towards the end of the fourth chapter, almost as if a saving grace to the entire volume. The dramatic impact is certainly there but, much of it is a cause of too little, too late as the first volume quickly comes to an end shortly as things start becoming interesting. Compounded with the slow character development and the lack of any depth explored within the characters, you are left at a cliffhanger at the end of the first volume but, with little justification for investment into the main character.

The biggest thing then keeping things moving along, is the setting itself which the manga does cleverly tease at the conclusion of its first volume. At this point, I am starting to sound like a broken record but, similar parallels can again be drawn to Attack on Titan where the premise of the series itself driven by its titular antagonist, be it Titans of Goldfish. The major difference is, Attack on Titan also focuses on spending a large portion of its plot development on its cast of human characters. To be fair, if the next volume of Shibuya Goldfish kept up the pace seen in the ending of the first volume, it would no doubt be able to achieve the same degree of world development as well. With 8 volume released thus far, I am certain that is entirely a possibility.

Aside from the preview for the second volume, the first volume also comes included with a bonus "omake" manga. It expands upon the base story with mostly comedic stories drawn in a simple, sketch style. Despite its simple appearance, it actually makes for a surprisingly good read.

Despite the inconsistent art and story pacing, the premise of Shibuya Goldfish remains to be a very intriguing one. The first volume does an admirable job of introducing the concept of a larger than life, man-eating goldfish roaming but, does little in the way of explaining much of what is going on. Discounting all of its deficiencies, I am still very much interested in seeing where the story will go for the Shibuya Goldfish story. A rocky start it may be but, the potential for this series runs deep with only room for improvement for here. I may not be rushing to read the second chapter anytime soon yet, I would not hesitate to recommend this series for fans of the horror manga series looking for something new. 

Well, that is all for my review of the first volume of Shibuya Goldfish. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to leave them in the comments section below. I would love to hear what you have to think. In the next series of the Tiro Finale Book Exchange Program, we will be going through randomly assigned light novels. Before that, it will be Takuya's review of his randomly assigned manga. Stay tuned for that right here on Tiro Finale. Until the next time, thank you so much for reading and have yourself a wonderful day ahead!