High schooler Hajime Tsukiyoda isn’t too keen on joining his friends for a mixer later today, he’d much rather work on shooting movies, and this is doubly so once he runs into a cute female classmate. But his life soon turns deeply weird as enormous, flying goldfish, babbling with human voices, appear around Shibuya and begin eating everyone in sight. How in the world are they supposed to make it out of the fishbowl around Shibuya alive?!
The biggest question I had about this story, which arose pretty quickly after I started reading it, was a simple “why does this manga even exist?” Did Hiroumi Aoi lose a bet and had to draw one of the world’s dumbest horror setups as a punishment? Was Aoi struggling to come up with ideas and just pulled random nouns out of a hat? Or did Aoi just really, REALLY want to draw realistic goldfish hundreds of times in a single volume? One Panel Later described the first volume as “what the sh*t horror” and I’m inclined to agree, what exactly is going on here? The extra pages in this volume give no indication as to what was going through Aoi’s mind and I really want to know, partially since that answer must be at least a little more interesting than the actual story itself.
I’m not a large fan of horror in any format (I hadn’t realized Shibuya Goldfish was a horror manga until I received it) but for the horror or thriller stories I do enjoy, I either find the characters interesting or the setting fascinating. Shibuya is not a fascinating setting, not that the characters or the story do much with the setting (you could easily put this setting in just about any large city and you would only need to change the title to make it work) and the characters are so flat that I was surprised they weren’t literally called “high school boy,” “aspiring idol,” and “policewoman.” For me, having utterly unremarkable characters in a horror story makes me enjoy the story even less. if the characters had been at least interesting then I would have had something to be invested in.
In fact, it looks like we have a complete point of view switch in volume two (since yes folks, this series has five volumes in Japan and it’s still ongoing) to a character who appears to be batcrap insane. I wonder if Hiroumi Aoi found the current cast just too dull, as the extra pages in this volume are devoted to minicomics about the female characters instead of providing the reader with elucidating remarks for just what was going through their mind. Perhaps they explain their thought process in volume 2, but I will not be sticking around long enough to see if it can move beyond Shibuya Goldfish’s incredibly dull beginning.