I was reminded of something a food show had said about using every part of an ingredient while cooking as I read Gift ±. In general, I think you’ve heard to not waste what you have, and this manga emphasizes that adage all the time.
Well, should I mention that for Gift ±, it involves not wasting human organs that were forcefully taken from morally bad/compromised people?
Yuka Nagate’s manga features medical terms, humans being dissected, and even a mystery plot involving two characters in the same vicinity, but they just don’t know it yet. Our main character is the mysterious Tamaki, who is in a local school and comes across as beautiful and also unemotional (see her talking down a student from committing suicide at school). Her side job involves finding the awful scumbags that escape the law, knock them out, then dissect all the good healthy parts from them (so the kidneys, womb, liver, etc).
Those parts are sold to many illegal places/people in Japan, but for this story, we’re focused on talented back alley doctor Hayashi, real name Takuma Hanabusa, who’s hiding from the police. While secretly (and illegally) performing surgeries to help people, he’s also hired someone to look for a patient he worked on years ago. That person?…Tamaki.
Aside from the main storyline of people finding bodies to, as one person put it, “disassemble”, the mystery between Hayashi and Tamaki is fascinating. They happen to be about in the same area, but for now, Hayashi can’t be seen in public. Meanwhile, Tamaki’s just plain mysterious. There’s little background on where’s she living at or her past in these first 8 chapters, only that she works for a group that’s selling illegal parts. She’s very gifted in dissection, and yeah, she might have gotten her techniques from Hayashi himself. However, he wants to find her because he says he’s not done with her yet. Well, it’ll be interesting to see when they find each other…I guess it’s not gonna be soon.
The other parts to Gift ± are also fascinating, but this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. The very first chapter features a man who was released out of jail after 15 years who is a serial rapist and murder…who goes back to try and do what he did before he was locked up. The first comment out of one of the guards at the prison was mention that the guy didn’t change despite prison time. Maybe cynical to say no one changes, but he comes across as someone that’s seen enough people leave and go back to doing what got them locked up in the first place. And for Tamaki and the group she works in, those are the people they want…to catch and “disassemble”.
So yeah, this manga isn’t for the squeamish since it actually shows the internal guts of people (and even cats), characters having sex (it is censored for the most part), and just absolutely awful characters to rally around. There might be just one morally good character in this work. Everyone else is either complicit in something shady or just a garbage human being who act like garbage. I’m curious as to how it’s going to go though — it’s 15 volumes and counting so far in Japan, so I’m wondering what happens to maintain interest. I have to hope surprising things happen since sure, the volumes can involve finding the lowest of the low and gutting them, but that’s unlikely to keep me interested for the long term.
But at this point, Gift ± does have my attention. I wish reading it was a bit better though. On Manga Club, you can only read it vertically, so you have to scroll down or up. That isn’t a major deal in general, but it is when your two page spreads have been cut to one page. And repeating the page to make sure you know what happened in that supposed two-page spread with it zoomed in IS rough. Can only try and deal with it the more I read this series.
