It’s Paru Itagaki’s world, and we’re fortunate enough to experience her amassing her catalog in real time. Be it Beastars going even further beyond Disney’s Zootopia, Sanda’s unhinged interrogation of the deification of adolescence, or Witching Hour’s hot-and-heavy tale about ghost cuckoldry, Itagaki is a tour de force who knows what she’s about. So when I was at Anime Expo and I heard that Viz Media had early copies of her latest manga, Taika’s Reason, which will be released to the general public on July 21, I got involved with that.
Light spoilers for that.
Off the bat, Taika’s Reason answers a Cars-ass question that’d been itching at the back of my mind with Beastars: What if humans were there? To combat Japan’s declining birthrate, science has engineered a way for household pets to become “humanized members of society.” Dogearing all the exclamation marks about what that could imply for later, Taika’s Reason hits the ground running by introducing our hero, Ao, a high school girl who walks home to find her dog, Taika, looming over the mauled body of her father.
Ao’s got questions. We all do. But time is of the essence. Instead of losing her father and having animal control put her pit bull down, she decides to get rid of the body and keep the horrors of that day a secret between her and her oblivious doggo.
Just when Ao feels ready to return to society after taking a few months away from school, her mother reveals that she humanized Taika. Now Taika, who’s excited to be alive, can sit at the dinner table with them, wear clothes, and, most importantly, talk. Unfortunately, the first thing Taika says to Ao in private doesn’t put her mind at ease. It nearly sends her into orbit.
“Let’s turn ourselves in together!”
Dear reader, the following scene prompted a genuine, out-loud “Ah!” moment for me as I realized, in real time, Ao’s plight with her: Taika is a dog. Dogs have short memories. Dogs are also agreeable to a fault. If someone tells a dog it was naughty, the dog will believe them. She’s fucked.
The rest of the manga is a rousing game of cat and mouse where Ao integrates Taika into her school life in an attempt to shoo away the thought of him narcing on her. That, and she theorizes that if given enough time to enjoy life as a dogperson, Taika would eventually gain the long-term memories of human beings and be able to explain why he killed their dad—or at least why that logical conclusion didn’t match what actually occurred. Naturally, their plan encounters a carousel of anxiety-inducing obstacles. Key among them is the tension between Taika and Ao’s boyfriend over her romantic affections, and the Louis-coded German Shepherd cop-dog classmate, Tsunayoshi, who's getting dangerously close to sniffing out their deadly secret.
I've said it a thousand times, but it bears repeating: In a landscape of manga where many works feel derivative or lack bite, Paru Itagaki stands head and shoulders above her contemporaries as a creator who delights in letting her creative freak flag fly. It’s not lost on me that my recommending yet another of her works has once again put my status as a non-furry into question; it’s a sacrifice I continue to be willing to make because this morbidly hilarious murder mystery is setting up to be a wildly fun time. Who doesn’t want to solve a murder mystery with man's best friend, who may or may not have committed the crime?
If you’re still an Itagaki holdout because of her out-there tales and disturbing artistry, which are of the scaring-the-hoes variety, I implore you to keep Simon Pegg’s Criterion Closet words of wisdom about David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and entertainment being an overrated function of art in mind:
“Sometimes being made uncomfortable is the point.”
Recommended
Isaiah Colbert
