The vampires return to Mangetsu with Shigahime, but the bloodhunt gives way to perverse relationships between the younger ones.
A lost young man
Since the first volume of Shigahime, the young high school student Osamu has become against his will the slave of a vampire. It upsets his personal life, but also his body. Osamu, who now watches with appetite for every taste of blood, resists this criminal urge, but until when? He has found a solution not to kill innocent people and even take revenge on vampires: he hunts the familiars. However, clumsy, he lacks the training to succeed. At the same time, without realizing it, he submits more and more to the rules of a slave and detaches himself from the normal life of a high school student. He can no longer keep up in class. Osamu's sexual attraction to his mistress Miwako becomes stronger and complicates his budding relationship with the high school girl Murase.
Three or four?
Hiding his double life from everyone, Osamu suffers a misunderstanding. His girlfriend believes she was saved by Murase's former familiar. She guesses that Tachibana knows a lot without wanting to say it and refuses to say it. Through it, we also discover the house of the first familiar. Due to his mother's depression, garbage invaded every room on several layers. He is also bullied at school.
In its hidden nightlife, Tachibana has a new status. He hunts for himself and no longer in the service of someone else. A love triangle is formed between the three high school students. However, love is overtaken by jealousy and contempt. In Shigahime, thespoir of being in love makes you more human, but then there's jealousy that makes you monstrous. In addition, an adult intervenes in this already complicated story. Miwako plays with everyone's feelings and makes even more perverse the feelings taking possession of the girl's body. We are not far from a rape. But, she is a complex character, because further, she helps his familiar by offering him a solution to fight without losing his humanity.
The series written and drawn by Sato Hirohisa works through the darkness of enemies. In this third volume, the reader attends with anguish the meeting between the two wives of the hero. But, far from the expected confrontation, the reader witnesses an exchange filled with lies and unspoken. The exchanges become almost sexual. An experienced dominatrix plays with a naïve submissive. The older one dresses the other as if she were teaching him how to seduce.
Hand-to-hand combat
Shigahime opposes humanity and animality. One mouth becomes a multiple mouth with fangs. We see a lot of entrails. The bodies and costumes of the familiars bring them closer to the animals: in the previous volumes, we meet a pig and here a cat. It is also found in their nicknames (snout and beak). By serving their mistress, they are no longer men, but domesticated animals. Conversely, freed from his submission, Tachibana metamorphoses with a madman's head of the king and a gigantic bone scythe. Far from Western vampires, they are humans whose bodies deform to become monsters. A movable arm can come out of the body becoming a fang of death, a severed head speaks.
Scenes seem to me only possible by the talent of drawing. Osamu's face changes. He has lost his adolescent candor and his hardening features express rage and the urge to murder. The drawing is sickening by details like a zoom in a horror movie. Sato Hirohisa plays on the texture of the skin to express suffering.
Even though it is a horror and action series, Shigahime is about the human and sexual body. In the middle of puberty, young people are looking for an identity or submit to an adult in a perverse relationship. The series also shows that young people are not gentle with each other and that high school students refuse any difference. The vision of Japan in Shigahime is dark, but exciting.
If you are still hungry for fresh series, you can find the chronicles on the first volume and the sequel.
