By Sakae Esuno
Tokyopop, 215 pp.
Rating: OT (16+)

Yukiteru is, to put it mildly, a bit of an outsider. He would rather take walks and record his observations in a text-message diary than hang out with the other students his age. He does have friends, and the fact that they are imaginary doesn’t stop him from enjoying their company. When his imaginary friend, Deux Ex Machina (aka The King of Space and Time) proposes they play a game one day, Yukiteru finds himself in a situation where his diary is written 90 days in the future and serves as a warning for when an opponent in Deus ex Machina’s game is about to kill him.

To be honest, I wasn’t all that excited about this series. The title is generic, the cover is drab, and the tagline “every text could be your last,” while accurate, put me off quite a bit. But all I had to do was open the book, and I was more or less hooked by the first page, which featured Yukiteru in the middle of a passionate kiss, holding a dart and thinking of stabbing the girl with it, and the girl whispering “You won’t, because it’s not in your future.” How intriguing. The next fifty or so pages were even better, since the idea of Yukiteru keeping a diary is a good one, and having an imaginary friend named Deus ex Machina who is King of Time and Space is pretty awesome, and then having the diary tell the future to the moment of your death while you are run down by a crazed serial murderer is excellent. It doesn’t really pause for breathing space either, so all these things happen in pretty rapid succession. It leaves you with very little time to wrap your mind around it, which does wonders for keeping up the manic, creepy pace the story uses.

Little is explained before the scenes with the serial killer, and Yuki is bewildered when he is forced to accept help from a girl in his class that is, for all intents and purposes, a really creepy stalker. After the initial mess with the serial killer is cleared up, we find out that Deus Ex Machina has actually organized a tournament with twelve contestants, each with a different type of diary that tells the future, and the object of the tournament is to kill each other by destroying everyone’s cellphone, their link to the future. The last person standing will become the new King of Time and Space. This is where it slowed down a little for me, since I tend to dislike series that are as obvious about their tournament structure as that. But this series goes about it a little differently, since the tournament takes place in the real world and the contestants’ identities are kept secret. It’s also interesting that each contestant has a diary that works a little differently. Yukihiko’s diary is the most detailed, but some contestants keep murder diaries, some keep diaries on other contestants, et cetera. Not much has been revealed about that yet, but that’s probably the story mechanic I’m most interested in.

Basically, while it is essentially about a tournament-style fight to be the King of Time and Space, absolutely everything else about it is executed near perfectly. Not just in how the story is told, but also in its atmosphere and pacing. It’s probably one of the few series I started out wanting to hate and loved after the first page.

Volume one of Future Diary is available now.