You may recognize HERO as one of the creators behind Horimiya, and for some readers, that’s enough to merit a pick. But the first volume of Ako and Bambi still stands on its own two feet even without that endorsement, and it differs significantly from its more famous sibling in some very meaningful ways. . The most important thing is that at this point, it’s not a platonic or romantic romance at all, although there are some hints that it could go in that direction later. Instead, it’s a story about two people trying to figure things out and meeting each other in a very unusual way: he is a writer, and she appears to be a ghost.
Ako and Bambi meet when Bambi moves into a haunted apartment house. Bambi recently won a new writer’s award, but he quickly realized that his new career wasn’t exciting at all. His editor told him that there weren’t many entries for the award he won, and as the story opened, he learned that his series had been cancelled. He is offered the chance to write short stories, but Bambi feels very confused and his creativity seems a bit dry to him. Part of the problem was that he wrote horror, which wasn’t a genre he liked very much, and he didn’t know how to get more inspired to start something new.
Enter Ako. When Bambi rents his impressively cheap apartment, he takes a deal because he’s told it’s haunted—a woman recently committed suicide in the bathtub. When Ako appeared behind him, Bambi at first thought it was her, but the high school girl corrected him: she had met the suicide ghost, but she was a different ghost. At some point, she just drifts into the apartment and chats with a woman in the bathtub, who then leaves to seek revenge on the man she blames for her death. alone, leaving Ako to haunt the apartment alone. The problem is that Ako isn’t sure how she died or how she got to Bambi’s apartment. All she knew was that she was dead and disappeared every morning with the sun.
Bambi is at first willing to accept this on the surface, but things quickly become more complicated when a surviving female high school student named Ako in a similar uniform appears. Suddenly Ghost Ako seems unaware of the full story of her existence, and Bambi, while given the ghost’s permission to build a character based on her, begins to wonder about the truth. This would be fine, but Hero takes it to the next level when it comes to why Bambi and Ghost Ako were able to communicate in the first place: there could very well be a story of bullying lurking beneath the surface. under everything else.
Bambi, we learn, dropped out of high school for unknown reasons, while a comment made by the mean girls in class to Ako implies that she tried to commit suicide at some point, or at least self-harmed to the point where that rumor started to spread. This begins to lead to the possibility that Ghost Ako is the part of Ako that she “killed”. As Bambi notes, Ghost Ako has a different hairstyle and does not wear glasses (although she sometimes tries to push them up, implying that she is wearing contacts and is not used to them), and she creates a brighter impression, even if her words and personality don’t necessarily match that appearance. When compared to Ako’s hesitant demeanor, loose hair, and glasses, it seems clear that Ako has undergone some major changes. Everything about her screams, “Don’t pay attention to me!” in a way that feels like self-defense, especially when we take into account the way the girls in her class treat her. Meanwhile, we don’t know what caused Bambi to drop out of school, but his interaction with a former classmate shows him acting very annoyed and the fact that he’s more or less silent when we meet he may be more than just an option; Bambi, like Ako, may be facing painful social situations in his past that have caused him to become a metaphorical ghost whose voice only exists on paper.
It’s too early to say how much, if any, of this is real. HERO does a great job of leaving us with tidbits to follow, allowing readers to grab what’s on the page and follow it, while still keeping the plot more like a slice of life rather than a complete mystery. full. Here, the use of a four-panel style works surprisingly well, with each strip leading smoothly into the next rather than feeling like one-off jokes or plot threads , which can easily happen with this format. The art uses mostly sepia tones with blue accents and once you get used to it, it’s very effective, creating the impression of a faded world that’s not quite our own.
The first volume of Ako and Bambi is thin but still feels like a full story. It’s playing close cards, but that makes you feel more compelled to read the next volume. If you like a light mystery story with dark tones and supernatural elements then this movie is worth a try.
Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.