It’s 2002 and the luxury cruise ships the Entrance and the Exit are ready to set sail! Firo and Ennis (and Czeslaw) are celebrating their honeymoon on one ship headed to Japan and on the other ship, some of the immortals are heading to New York to visit Maiza for a centuries overdue reunion, now that everyone knows that Silizard is long dead.
But there are groups on both ships running amuck, trying to capture the immortals/ram the ships/kill everyone on board/or worse. Hang on, you’re saying that this meeting of cultists, mercenaries, child actors, a gunslinger, and half a dozen immortals reminds you of a certain, ill-fated train ride a century earlier? Perhaps Czes should stop going on these long trips….
While this book is set in 2002, and therefore you might assume it’s most closely related to 2001/Children of the Bottle, I actually found myself reaching for 1705/The Ironic Light Orchestra to reference much more often since Huey, Elmer, and Monica’s actions there three centuries earlier were what set some of these groups of characters into motion. If you can read these three books close together that would be for the best; there is a fan wiki for the Baccano series but I’ve found it rather easy to run into spoilers while double-checking details.
And boy were there so many things for me to double-check over these two volumes! For the first time I found myself honestly getting annoyed at Ryohgo Narita for introducing so many new characters at once, as there are about a dozen new names/alias to keep track of, and according to his afterword (although it’s more of a “middleword”) he originally intended to introduce even more! While they have wildly different actions and ideologies, our two new major groups of characters — the Mask Makers (founded by the aforementioned 1705 characters) and SAMPLE (“I know we just killed off this cult 45 pages and 10 years ago so why are they BACK?”) — fulfilled the same basic plot mechanics for a good 80% of the story which made the inclusion of both groups rather tedious. While SAMPLE is the more interesting group in theory, taking the idea of “what is god? what is life?” to the Narita-esque extreme, the characters cross too far over the “crazy, but still likable” line which made the Mask Makers more tolerable to read about in comparison. Too bad it looks like SAMPLE will be the bigger player going forward in the 2000s time period, but more on that in a bit.
There are plenty of other, mercifully less cult-ish, characters that we get our first proper look at in this volume as well. We are more formally introduced to the final surviving immortal from the Advena Avis, the Japanese-born Denkurou who we did meet briefly in 1705 but all we learned of him there was that he was an unlikely character to be on a boat with a group of demon-summoning alchemists. We also have an even more curious group of “returning” characters, which require the readers to remember way back to volume one and remember how this series started. The framing device for the first Baccano! volume, The Rolling Bootlegs, is slightly different from the anime adaptation: in the novel the story starts in 2002 with an unnamed Japanese photographer who has just had his camera bag stolen in NYC turning to the local mob (uh, Camorra) to get it back and, while that’s happening, Firo tells him a wild tale from 1930. Well, not only are Firo, Ennis, and Czes going to Japan to see him, but the pickpockets themselves, a gang of kids, have somehow stowed away on the ship!
I think Narita has a little too much fun sometimes with how everything seems to be connected in these stories, but the kids do tie together some of the different actors in volume 12 (sometimes literally, Huey and Chane’s great-grandkids are also on-board doing promotional work for a C-grade monster film they both starred in) and they were easier to keep track of than some of the adult groups. As a bonus, the leader of the kids seems to be the first person in the entire series to recognize that Ronnie is a demon of their own volition, although even he probably thought he was exaggerating when he says “and then a demon appeared out of nowhere in our hideout, took the camera bag back, and then we got chewed out for it.”
These two volumes certainly feel like they’re setting up a larger arc, if for no other reason the sheer number of characters introduced, but I could be wrong since as of yet Narita hasn’t returned to the 2002 timeline in the series. In fact, the series seems to have been on hiatus for a while with no new volumes since 2016 and it seems as if Narita has been mostly working on other franchises like the Bleach and Fate/Strange Fake series rather than Baccano! or the Durarara!! sequel.
While we’re not in danger of catching up to the Japanese releases for another couple of years still, I do hope Narita returns to this series sooner rather than later to continue the 2000s storyline. I’m still enjoying the pulpyness of the 1930s timeline but there are hints of how the characters have changed in the intervening 70 years, like Huey possibly mellowing out just a tiny bit, that have me really intrigued. And that’s the true draw to this series, we’re not just here for the hijackings, fights with improbable weapons, and mysterious organizations, we’re here to see how character X deals with character Y in the middle of a shoot-out when jumping from one cruise ship to another in what’s almost a real-life zombie apocalypse, that’s the real fun of it!