By Asuka Izumi, Original Story by K-Ske Hasegawa
DC/CMX, 161 pp.
Rating: T+

Ballad of a Shinigami is a collection of short stories linked by the presence of Momo, a white shinigami (basically a grim reaper) that appears to people who are contemplating suicide or near death. In the brief prologue, we learn that Momo is an unusual shinigami in that she does what she can to save lives. The first story is about a boy named Makoto who is haunted by the death of his parents and has constant nightmares about being stabbed. He is a loner, and is frequently physically ill because of the trauma, but a girl at school begins to reach out to him, and may be in a not-entirely-dissimilar situation. In the second story, a boy named Asano is having a hard time getting over the death of his sister, Subaru, who died while saving him from an accident. He has it in his head that he will die soon as well, and a girl at school with feelings for him doesn’t appreciate the gloomy thoughts. In the final story, a dying woman tells the story of a first love where the boy went away and came back… well, not quite the prince charming that was expected.

I was a little surprised by the format of this series, since I had imagined it consisted of episodic stories about Momo the shinigami, but she only puts in one or two appearances in each story, and is surprisingly devoid of personality through the entire book. Rather, it is a series that takes a look at how people deal with death and dying. There are a lot of series about shinigami out there (Bleach, Full Moon, Death Note, the recent Rin-ne), but most of them use shinigami as just a profession or a starting point for the story rather than someone who actually takes the souls of the dying. Surprisingly, among all those series, Full Moon is the only one that looks seriously at the emotional implications of ferrying the souls of the dead, and Full Moon is a series meant for little girls.

The prologue is an excellent, if overly brief, way to start the book. The protagonist, Ryo, is actually standing on the top of a building and getting ready to jump off when interrupted by Momo. Momo tries to stop Ryo by admitting that Ryo would not meet any loved ones after death since suicide victims become shinigami (an interesting twist I’ve only ever seen in Full Moon), and then comes up with another way to stop Ryo when that fails. The short made quite an impact, and I was a little disappointed when the other, more developed stories didn’t pack nearly as much punch.

Don’t get me wrong, they are in no way bad, but they aren’t quite as deep as they could be. They did deal with some not-so-superficial topics such as domestic abuse and unrealistic personal expectations in addition to death. Some didn’t even feature protagonists that wanted to die or were near-death. Unfortunately, the characters don’t have quite enough depth to pull off the impact necessary for these types of stories. A possible explanation for the shortcomings could be that this is a manga adaptation of a light novel series, and it’s rare for such adaptations to be flawless.

They are still okay stories, and as I said, much different than typical shinigami series, but they don’t reach out and grab the reader in the way they should. It wouldn’t take much more polish to make them fantastic stories, though, so I have hope that future volumes will keep the interesting themes while developing the characters a bit more.

Volume one of Ballad of a Shinigami is available now.