After a timeskip and a leap across the ocean for volume 5, Baccano! is back in 1930s New York City and the times are a’changing for our immortal cast. With the impending changes brought about by the 21st Amendment (December 15, 1933) the mafia and camorra groups the Gandors and the Martillos are beginning to diversify their interests, since bootlegging will no longer be a profitable source of income. They are also beginning to crack down more on other small outfits operating in their areas, like a gang of Chicago kids who showed up right after the Flying Pussyfoot’s memorable last journey.
That is where this story begins, with some immortals about to conduct business.
Or, maybe this all begins with a strange group of killers from Chicago whose number might or might not contain a vampire (since yes, vampires are a thing in the Narita-verse).
Oooooor, maybe this begins with a certain duo holding a grudge about a certain someone knocking down their domino set-up before they were done.
Regardless of where it starts, like all Baccano stories, it will all come together and end in the same place: on the upper floors of a building owned by the mysterious Nebula corporation. The owners of the Flying Pussyfoot, and several decades into the future Namie Yagiri from Durarara!!’s employer, it seems as if Nebula, not the immortals, are the true underlying force that ties everything together in this series so I’ve been hoping they would appear sooner rather than later.
But Nebula only takes center stage in the second of this duo of novels. The first book spends its time explaining how everyone will end up in the upper floors of Nebula’s building and introducing a slew of new characters. Not new, but arguably the “main” characters of this arc, are the Gandor’s torturer Tick and the dual katana-wielding Latina Maria who also work for the Gandors.
Individually they’re both somewhat flat characters. Ryohgo Narita loves to write characters with strange (or just straight up lacking) sense of morals, but I feel that these characters are usually the flattest of all. Tick and Maria do work rather well together — the way the two of them lift each other up emotionally during the story is rather sweet and humanizing — but I can’t say that about some of the other new characters introduced. The strange members of immortal Huey Laforet’s group Lamia came off more as irritating than interesting and I truly hope they don’t reappear too often. Narita has far too many “psychopaths with twisted worldviews” characters by this point and he writes them all seeming very very similar to each other which makes their point of view sections extra tedious to get through.
Weirdly enough, when one of the members is forced to have a prolonged conversation with Vino, it actually works and the two of them bounce off of each other interestingly. However I suspect this is because Vino has already been pretty well established in the previous books and frankly he’s on the saner side of this cast.
Speaking of oddballs in the cast, Issac and Miria don’t play a huge role in this story but they are the instigator of large chunks of the plot (naturally). Honestly, there are modern day global companies that WISH they have the number of contacts Issac and Miria do, they seem to know every character in the 1930s era of the novels! Jacuzzi’s gang is starting to develop a lot of contacts as well and I hope they make more appearances in future volumes. Given their run-in with the Gandors and the Martillos in this volume, plus they already know the Genoards, Issac and Miria, and now the Larvae group, it does seem like the most “normal” group is being set-up to play a bit of a bigger role in future volumes.
It’s installments like this which really makes me wish there was a second season of the anime! The climax of these two volumes reminded me of why I fell in love with the anime. Anyone who has been missing the anime should give these a read if they aren’t already, since only the tiniest part of a scene from these two novels was ever adapted so it really is a brand new story but with all of your favorite characters. And with a three-parter on the horizon, I continue to look forward to each new Baccano! release and hope that Narita stops introducing so many new characters in every volume.