Spoilers for GACHIAKUTA chapters 1-5: Kodansha’s new K Manga app has a lot of manga available to read, and I am here for it! For one thing, a lot of the titles that used to be available on the buggy Crunchyroll manga app have been moved over and are seeing actual regular updates(!). But there are also a ton of titles that I wouldn’t have found otherwise, and GACHIAKUTA (published in Weekly Shonen Magazine) is one of these.
Our story begins with our hero, a kid named Rudo, er, rifling through the trash. You might be forgiven for thinking that this will be played for laughs, ala Honkai: Star Rail, but the story quickly disabuses you of that notion. Rudo’s world is divided into two parts: the haves, who have nice houses and large yards; and the have-nots, who basically live in the slums. This division is justified in that the ancestors of the have-nots were supposedly criminals. And it’s easy to be a criminal when everything is so tightly regulated, including trash: apparently recycling and upcycling (which Rudo is engaged in) are against the law here. But does Rudo get caught? Oh no, he gets away with it—only to be framed for murder instead.
His punishment, like that of all criminals, is to be dropped into what he thinks is a giant hole in the ground (and the same place they throw their trash). At the bottom, however, (and yes, he survives) he finds he’s on the real surface of the ground: the world he’s always known is a city in the sky, and the inhabitants of the world’s surface don’t appreciate all the trash being dropped on them. Moreover, the trash has started coming to life in the form of giant monsters that are tough to kill and have a taste for human flesh. So the ground denizens aren’t happy to see Rudo. Nevertheless, he signs up to help take out the monsters and maybe have a shot at getting back up to the flying city to set things straight.
Review: GACHIAKUTA hits a number of popular beats—the down-on-his-luck shonen protagonist who loses everything but discovers he’s got a potentially OP skillset, the false view of the world, the post-apocalyptic trash society—and does so fairly well. Only occasionally does it veer into feeling a bit cliché. This world sits somewhere in the middle between the idealism of Black Clover and the cynicism of Chainsaw Man, though perhaps a tad closer to the former. What helps bolster GACHIAKUTA‘s fairly standard shonen fair, however, is the above average way that the story frames issues of environmentalism and social inequity. You can’t help but feel the injustice in how different people are treated and looked down upon, even within their own social classes; or how severe a problem unsustainability is. Here GACHIAKUTA manages to be compelling without shoving its Aesop in your face. And as I said before, I am here for it. Looking forward to reading more!
GACHIAKUTA can be read for free on the K Manga website or pre-ordered on Amazon (shipping January of next year). If you use the Amazon link, you’ll be supporting my blog and make my day!
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I’ve lost track of a lot of the new manga but this does look interesting and the topics are certainly relevant with classism, the environment, and people justifying segregation. Hopefully the whole series ends up being good.
My thoughts exactly! It was the way it showed how easy it is to justify segregation or discrimination, even even one is a victim too, that really sold me on it. I can’t remember another series that did this much, let alone well.
Awesome! I’m glad you noticed that, too. It’s insane how even in society today, you have people who make up flimsy justifications to demonize other people. It also didn’t help today when I saw a video that talked about specific instances of Black people getting lynched in history for the most petty things like asking for their own shovel back or a drink of water (I wish I was making those examples up). Don’t even get me started on Western movies or series that have implications of segregation/discrimination being something to bring order and peace to society (I’m looking at you, Lion King!) which really has a disturbing subtext if you really think about it. The only other Japanese work I can think of which had that as a narrative point was the original Toward the Terra movie which was very fascinating how it used a supercomputer as a metaphor for systemic racism and discrimination against the psychic Mu people with the human government persecuting them and some of the humans say “What did they ever do to us?” in passing. That’s an underrated anime movie right there.
Oh my gosh, that’s horrifying! I knew those kinds of things happened, but still. But thanks for bringing Toward the Terra to my attention; I wasn’t familiar with it. Will be sure to look it up now!
It truly is and while I knew how it’s a blight on American history, I wasn’t aware of some of these specifics. There’s a museum that covers those specific atrocities. No problem about Toward the Terra. I think the movie doesn’t get enough credit for themes that are more timely in hindsight despite coming out in the early 80s.