Girl May Kill

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Okay let me first give a disclaimer that this manga is basically for a mature audience completely. Not that it's constantly involving mature themes, but rather dealing with concepts that are distant from the innocence that you would expect from modern anime & manga.

I read this via Crunchyroll manga, and after about 10 chapters I ordered the Japanese manga.

The story: is about Gohongi, a man in his mid-twenties without any real family left, moving back to his hometown, working and living at a movie shop in chinatown. He suddenly gains new roommates to later find out they are all involved in the mafia ... named "Lovely Hometown". One of the new roommates, is a fifteen year-old girl named Mei which Gohongi constantly tries to convince to try a new lifestyle. He eventually steps too far into the mafia life and ends up involved. He is constantly struggling with the concept of death, and worries for Mei while she finds solace in hanging around Gohongi.

My opinion: Although at 23 chapters and 4 volumes, this series was somewhat brief, I am astonished at the character development. In both a good way and bad way. I say this, because later on certain characters make decisions which seem rather "out of character". I mostly enjoyed it regardless, because it made everything more suspenseful. I thoroughly enjoyed the manga and am very surprised at the lack of general attention this series has received. There are some parts that kind of made me uncomfortable, but I was able to get through it. The ending left me sad and slightly confused, but it was also beautiful and I don't think I will read another manga like this in a long time. I imagine this will eventually become a cult hit.

This is the only series I've ever read in its entirety in one sitting.

Girl May Kill is a bloody, dark, gangster mafia manga. The situations presented in the story are already disturbing enough. And then when you take in the fact that one of the main characters is just a fifteen-year-old girl, it makes it even more so.

The story is told mostly told from Aki Gohongi's perspective, a 20-something-year-old guy returning to his childhood hometown to work at a video store. He thinks he's coming back to familiar territory, but he quickly learns of the underworld and dealings that goes on behind the scenes. He ... promises himself that he won't get involved. But if you know how these stories go, you can probably guess how well he keeps his promise...

Girl May Kill is very reminiscent of classic gangster films; one scene even symbolically pays homage to the film Scarface. And although it draws from these older gangster films, the story itself is far from cookie-cutter. One twist in the plot in particular caught me completely off-guard.

From what I drew, two themes are blatantly evident throughout. The theme of everyone having harboring evil inside of them. And "scorpion and turtle" theme (you'll know this is about when you get to that point in the story).

It has been rumored that the story was meant to be much, much longer. Somewhere around 100 chapters instead of the 23 we ended up with. That being said, the last few chapters feel rushed and I admit that the ending is very abrupt with many questions left unanswered. If it had kept going, this had the potential to be a 9 or maybe even a 10 in my book. I highly recommend it.

You might read this series, perhaps get drawn into it, and wonder what the hell all the people who gave it such a low rating were smoking. Did they expect something else? Were they prudes and objected to some of the content? And then you come to the ending and it all becomes clear.

There are happy endings, there are melancholic endings, there are tragic endings. Any of those three types would've worked here if done well. What we got instead was a troll ending, a big middle finger thrown to the reader.

This short series started out as a 7/10, became ... a strong 8/10 towards the end, and ended with the dumbest finale imaginable. I'm talking Gantz TV or Mai Hime finales dumb here, though in a very different way from both. Instead of the premise spiraling into dumb, here the main character does something so ridiculously stupid that you just stare at the page in shock and think WTF??

So I was enjoying it a lot until then, it had a lot of promise, and was only getting better, and then it got a rushed final arc leaving lots of unresolved plot points and ending with ... dumb.