Framed for the brutal murder of his classmates, fourteen-year-old Ganta Igarashi is sentenced to death, and locked away in the notorious, privately-owned prison Deadman Wonderland to live out that sentence -- a hellish, warped theme park where inmates must compete in gladiator battles or die agonizing deaths for public entertainment...
Not to mention that some inmates -- "Deadmen," as it's put -- somehow have the power to control their blood...
Initially, I didn't intend to write about this series. I started re-reading it this month, because when I originally read it, it was over the course of two years as I waited for a volume to come out every other month. I also didn't revisit the earlier volumes as I continued, and as always, my memory of the early story got fuzzy by the time I'd completed my collection.
I went at it in one go this time, and it was a really fun experience to get to see the story again with a new lens, both of maturity and, well, getting to consume it all back-to-back, which I'd argue is how stories should be read.
But I wasn't taking notes until the last volume... so I guess I'll have to wing it.
As noted above, the premise of the series is honestly quite absurd. Essentially, Deadman Wonderland is a privately owned prison that sprung up in Japan after the story's scenario of "The Great Tokyo Earthquake," which sunk nearly half of the nation's metropolitan Kanto region. It's presented as a tourist attraction; where death row inmates are forced to compete in tournaments and games that frequently claim their lives.
The protagonist, Ganta, discovers that he has a power called "Branch of Sin," in which if he's injured and starts to bleed, he can manipulate his blood as a weapon. Some Deadmen (as Branch of Sin users are called) can manipulate their blood like whips, or like scythe blades, but Ganta shoots it like a projectile, leading to anemia -- which inhibits his performance in "Carnival Corpse," a televised 1 v 1 between Deadmen in G ward, the maximum security branch of DW where the Deadmen are held.
This little post isn't about summarizing the events of the series, though... I want to more so talk about some of the story's elements, themes, motifs and ideas.
It's clear that a theme in the story is captivity. The Deadmen are given stage names, all of which are the names of birds; the demented Minatsuki Takami is "Hummingbird," the mysterious, Branch of Sin copying Toto Sakigami that haunts the underbelly of the prison is "Mockingbird," (who would have thought?), and the badass ex-cop Senji Kiyomasa is "Crow."
Ganta Igarashi himself is known as "Woodpecker," which is in direct reference to a lullaby sung by his mother. It's a song his albino, childhood friend Shiro, knows quite well;
One mischievous little woodpecker
Another day, pecking your holes
Ruining the woods, tree wrecker
The angry old forest god turned your poor beak into a poison knife
Poor little woodpecker
Your nesting holes are all tainted, your food with toxins rife
Touch your friends, and they all will die falling at your feet
Oh, sad little woodpecker
Poisonous tears, shining brightly, as they stream down your cheeks
The lullaby, initially, seems to be all about Ganta; the attitude people have toward him as the supposed man who massacred his middle school class (yikes!) is that of hatred and disgust, and as he's Woodpecker, the lyrics another day, pecking your holes, ruining the woods, tree wrecker and touch your friends, and they all will die falling at your feet are not exactly veiled allusions to this attitude people project onto him.
But in time, we see that the song has a second meaning -- Shiro, the girl he was reunited with in DW, is actually the second subject of the song. She's not given a bird moniker, mainly because she's not presented as a Deadman at first -- but by volume two, the audience would already know that she's The Wretched Egg, or as Ganta would say, "The Red Man," who is the person who killed Ganta's classmates in the first place. Early in the series, it looks like she has multiple personality disorder, and thus compartmentalizes her Wretched Egg persona when exposed to "The Mother Goose System's" constant echoing of the woodpecker lullaby.
We see several themes tying in together and playing off each other when this is revealed. (I'll circle back to the bird names, I promise.) First of all, Deadman Wonderland makes full use of its medium as a manga (or comic, in a broad sense) to showcase very graphic, ridiculous action violence. People are dismembered and decapitated. Stabbed, shot, exploded, tortured -- forced to undergo unnecessary surgery, crucified, burned alive -- one character even shoves their hand up into the neck of a severed head, forces their fingers through the upper jaw, and uses the head as a sock puppet. Deadman Wonderland certainly isn't the most violent of manga, but it's still very vivid. And it's completely absurd.
But that exact idea -- the absurdity of the prison's mechanics as a tourist trap, the meaninglessness in all this gratuitous violence -- is actually a fleshed out theme in the narrative.
Absurdity is one step from meaninglessness. When we reach the final volume, as Ganta and Shiro are fighting, we see the hopeless mundanity in both of their lives; the difference, is that Ganta took pleasure in the average-ness of his life, and therefore found a reason to live. As Shiro was nothing but a prisoner, she could not. So she found a different purpose;
Shiro reveals her reason to live was to die by Ganta's hand -- Ganta was originally going to be a guinea pig in inhumane, cruel human experimentation, but his mother couldn't go through with it and adopted Shiro for that purpose instead. But Shiro was also a close friend to Ganta when they were tiny children, both living on the Tokyo Medical Center campus (where scientists and doctors would take her away for their tests daily).
This raises a question -- what is it someone chooses to live for?
Idaki Hitara, one of the Deadmen, is teaching a class at the end of the story. In his lecture, he expounds upon the idea of absurdism, and applies a meaning to life in pushing past that absurdity -- "To stare irrationality in the face and resist."
Shiro only wanted to be happy. But she didn't believe she'd ever obtain it. She was a bird in a cage; a woodpecker, pecking her holes into trees, incapable of leaving the prison born from her actions (as the Great Tokyo Earthquake happened because she was told using her powers -- powers she gained by countless experiments -- would kill her. So she tried to commit suicide by using everything she had, and sunk a fifth of Japan in the process).
In the face of this meaninglessness, she found a new reason to live. And by the end of the story, it has changed once more. She might have hated Ganta for forgetting her, but she loves him too.
The concept of captivity and birds is not an uncommon theme in literature. Birds often symbolize freedom, simply because they can fly. Man has always looked up at the sky and yearned for the wings of a bird, and trapping that bird in a cage takes the creature's one ubiquitous trait and locks it away. Playing with the idea of absurdity --> meaninglessness/captivity --> forging a meaning to live/breaking out of that captivity, Deadman Wonderland has satisfying thematic catharsis.
I wouldn't go so far to say Deadman Wonderland is brilliant, though. It has a solid story with a great utilization of its traits and limitations as a manga, lovely art, and likable characters. But I wouldn't say it's got exceptional dialogue, groundbreaking ideas, or noteworthy conflict. There's also a lot of unconvincing plot developments, but the simple fact that they border on absurd (like the original warden Tamaki somehow convincing the public that live slaughter was special effects, or the fact that a place like Deadman Wonderland was even constructed in the first place) is honestly excusable when understood that they play into the story's theme of absurdity anyway.
(It's also just good practice just to suspend your disbelief anyway when reading something like an action comic).
So that's not to say it's not worth reading. I certainly don't regret purchasing or re-reading this manga, and if you like the idea of meaning deliberately applied to meaningless violence (which might be a somewhat groundbreaking idea, if I think on it now), then I do suggest it. Ganta and Shiro aren't original characters, but they're enjoyable characters, which is all that matters. Not to mention how gorgeous English releases are!
If only English manga had dust jackets...
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WOW! This was a lot of fun to write. I haven't written something like this in a long time, and I expected to roll this out in January, but I couldn't wait. I'm very proud of it, and I hope it was an enjoyable read.
I can't wait to write about other titles like Fullmetal Alchemist and Attack on Titan. If Berserk and Hunter x Hunter ever end in my lifetime (lmao), you can bet I'd be writing about them too.
Have a good New Year!
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