Stories about the collapse of civilization are starting to hit too close to home to be fun now that we're living in “historic times” every week. Despite living in a dystopia where I’m resigned to either doom scroll past tech oligarchs use their children as human shields or bottom-of-the-barrel AI-generated memes burning down rainforests, I’ve been on a mission to read more imaginative dystopian manga to stave away the depressing monotony of the day-to-day. On a whim, I picked up Kasumi Yasuda’s eco-dystopian sci-fi series Fool Night out of my manga backlog. Having maxed its 90 chapters in the span of a week, it’s one of the most aesthetically horrific and conceptually rich dystopian series I’ve read.
Imagine: It's the 24th century, and dark clouds blotting out the sun for over a century have plunged the world into an eternal winter. Connection to space satellites is all but mute. The whole “no internet” of it all could be seen as a mercy, but the biggest threat to humanity is that a majority of all plant life has become extinct. No plants; no oxygen. The cure: a cutting-edge medical procedure called transfloration that transforms human beings into plants to keep the starved civilization breathing. Like a military recruitment center conveniently located near the supermarket of a low income neighborhood, transfloration is (in theory) a procedure targeted at terminally ill members of society. Each transfloration patient is given 10 million yen (roughly $66,000) after a successful procedure to live their lives for two years, until their bodies eventually twist into roots, branches, and leaves. If they’re lucky, they’ll be potted inside their family’s homes, providing them enough sweet breathable air for the rest of their days.
Fool Night quickly throws cold water on the romantic sentiment of its premise by reminding readers that we live in capitalistic society and our autonomy is prime for the taking, especially if all we can do in protest is photosynthesize. Throughout the series, the last vestiges of society struggle with the sustainability and ethics behind the makeshift solution to its ecological problem– a problem not made any easier to swallow with an oxygen tax thrown onto the pile of cost of living not matching up to wages. While the propaganda of the world prop up transfloration patients as bed-ridden heroes of society, it's actually the folks on the fringes of society— the homeless and low-income workers—who crowd transfloration clinics. The rest of the world looks on in disgust as they fast-track their way out of poverty.
The existential circumstances of becoming a plant and what happens to you afterward is as terrifying as having your twisted floral body hug the sides of buildings like ivy. Since transfloration amounts to a pretty penny for the lower echelon of wage workers, human trafficking is as commonplace as it is a ritualistic way to make ends meet. If you thought a modicum of peace could be found by transforming into a plant, you’d be dead wrong, because there’s also good money for people trafficking your generous photosynthesizing ass into a handmade furniture store and turning you into a fancy settee or a grand piano.
All of the above is just the set dressing of Fool Night’s mesmerizing world. The story proper escalates its already eyebrow-raising premise by diving head first into its ethical and sustainable quandary with a suspenseful political thriller on par with famed 20th Century Boys and Monster mangaka Naoki Urasawa’s penmanship. The driving force behind Fool Night is its protagonists Yomiko Hourai, an employee of the National Transfloration Institute, and her childhood friend Toshiro Kamiya, a transfloration patient who simply wants to find pleasure in his life beyond work before he dies. He also has the uncanny ability to speak to the folks who were transformed into plants. Yeah, that’s a thing.
For the past five years, Fool Night’s story has blossomed on Viz Manga as its heroes engage in nail-biting cat-and-mouse games with a transflorized serial killer, uncover secret government transhumanism conspiracies, and sort out whether they’re on the side of anti-transfloration protest movements or big flora. While I wouldn’t necessarily trade our own dystopia for Yasuda’s ongoing manga, the gulf between its thought-provoking drama and exploration of humanity and our own is refreshingly night and day.
