Astral Project 1

I actually forgot I had this.  This is one of the few series my roommate enjoys, and he’s the one that reminded me of it since he asked about the second volume.  It’s got everything he loves in it though: jazz musicians and conspiracy theories.  That’s a weird enough mix to get most people’s attention, I think.

It is, for sure, a weird series.  A boy’s sister dies of heart failure, but he suspects she committed suicide after being under pressure from their overbearing parents.  As a keepsake, he takes the CD she has in her CD player.  This turns out to be a jazz compilation, and while listening to it, Masahiko has an out-of-body experience.  The rest of the volume focuses on Masahiko trying to figure out this new state he finds himself in, tracking down others like himself in the night sky, trying to see if the CD gives anyone an out-of-body experience, and figuring out what his sister had been involved with, if anything, before her death.

The best thing about this series is that I have literally no idea where it’s going to go next.  It actually is pretty down-to-Earth about the whole astral projection thing.  So instead of having funky adventures and saving the world when he finds he can do this, he just enjoys testing his limits and experimenting.  He has a job as a driver for an escort service specializing in former celebrities, so these girls occasionally enter in the fringes of the story.  Other people who can astral project include a homeless man and a female convenience store clerk.  Aside from astral projection, we also get the possibility of a religious cult and some sort of bizarre heierarchy among the beings who can astral project.

My roommate tells me Albert Ayler is a real jazz musician.  Bonus points to this manga for that, and paralleling his death with Yukio Mishima’s suicide.  Apparently they happened on the same day.  The drummer that the Jazz expert speaks to, Basil Thompson, is unfortunately not a real person.  I find it hard to believe that the Jazz expert couldn’t hear the difference between real and electronic instruments, though.

The art is also weird and totally different.  I wasn’t entirely sure I liked it at first, but it had grown on me by the end of the volume.  It’s got weird moments of extreme detail, and it can get surprisingly stylized when something weird is going on.  I also like the use of thick outlines, too.

No bad could come of anyone reading this, I think, though I think it will be a few more volumes before it really starts to grip me.