Black Sun Silver Moon Vol. 1

Honestly, when I was given a list of manga to choose from, I didn’t do the intelligent thing like peruse them, look for summaries, and then pick what sounded interesting to me. No, I decided I would haphazardly choose titles with no basis for what they were about, pick them up, and then review them. This was in part because I was told some of the stuff on here was “darker” and I usually tend towards the humorous and goofy, so I figured there wouldn’t really be “choices” for me anyhow. Black Sun Silver Moon ended up being one of those titles that sounds like something I’d enjoy, but honestly, just ends up with me knowing no better word to describe it than… odd.

Taki’s an eighteen year-old whose father has recently passed away, leaving him with a family of nine brothers and sisters and a mysteriously absent mother that’s never really mentioned. A large family isn’t the only thing Taki’s father left behind – a priest by the name of Father Shikimi comes knocking to inform the family that their father had a huge debt with his church. With a family to provide for and being the oldest and therefore most responsible, Taki takes the job and heads off into the mountains to help out Father Shikimi in order to repay his father’s outstanding debt.

At first, the job is quite simple, though incredibly boring and tiresome – seems Father Shikimi’s major pastime is being a total pig. Taki’s left cleaning for him left and right, day and night, and has to live with the frustration of being relatively unappreciated for all his efforts. Then things get a little more interesting – seems the area has a little problem with the dead rising from their graves due to demons possessing the corpses. It’s up to Taki and Shikimi to keep these “Resurrected” at peace, putting the undead to their final rest by lopping off their heads.

So what exactly is it that makes me deem this manga “odd” and nothing more? Well, for one, the tone is outright confused. It has a dash of comedy in the butting of heads between the two lead characters, some random cuteness thrown in with the addition of a rambunctious puppy later on, the macabre overtone of fighting the undead, and a bit of drama when concerning Father Shikimi’s past. While the last series I reviewed, D.Gray-man, made that work, the lack of definitive tone combined with a very weak beginning hook to the whole story has left me somewhat unsatisfied.

The characters themselves are wholly uninteresting – Taki’s got all of two flaws, neither of which are particularly unique or cumbersome to the tasks he’s required to do, and Father Shikimi seems like he’s just the generic brooding character who needs to be redeemed but is too stubborn to let others help. I feel like both of them could have been so much more, but the author seemed so eager to get into the whole undead/demon setting that their back stories weren’t important enough to make it into the first volume. While this could be perceived as an effective way to keep you reading, it really works to the opposite effect – I haven’t developed enough of an interest in the characters to want to know what happens next. It doesn’t help that the closest thing to a supporting character is the dog, so you’re pretty much looking at just two flat characters and nothing more.

The art style is nothing spectacular – it’s neither unique nor memorable, so I can’t really give the book props for that either. Even the book’s composition is poorly thought out, with a bonus chapter at the end… or so you think. It actually turns out to be four pages of random fluff thrown in, which comes right after Maeda-san’s debut one-shot manga, which I had no idea was the case until I read the translated author’s notes in the back. This “fourth chapter” was marked and labeled in the same exact fashion as all the previous chapters, so I thought for about the first four or five pages of it that it was a flashback for the book’s history or something. Honestly, I’m still not sure whether or not this is the case. It’s not very clear, and if it is related to the story, I’ve yet to figure out how.

In the end, I’m going to have to say no to another volume of Black Sun Silver Moon – it didn’t catch me in the first volume, and I highly doubt it’ll catch me in the next. With flat characters and a stagnant, overdone theme as its story, I can’t justify picking up the second. If I were an extreme shounen-ai fan, I might take a small amount of enjoyment in the very vague relationship the two main male characters have with one another, but as that’s not the case, I’m definitely passing on this one.