In a recent manga review for the Daily Yomiuri, Tom Baker recently reviewed the manga “Gantz”. Here is an excerpt from Baker’s review:
“What a jerk.” I’m not sure whether I said the words out loud, but this was my first thought upon being introduced to Kei, the main point-of-view character of the manga series Gantz.
He’s a smug, self-centered high school kid standing on a subway platform and looking sideways at the other commuters, thinking disparaging thoughts about them. When a little old lady asks for directions, he deliberately misleads her just to make her go away. Kei is no Boy Scout.
“I may look stupid,” he thinks, “but to tell the truth I know I’m better than everyone else in the world.”
Masaru, a childhood friend whom Kei hasn’t seen in years, is a better specimen of humanity. By coincidence, he happens to be standing on the same platform, and when a drunk falls onto the tracks, Masaru leaps to his aid.
In a scene that establishes a significant motif, dozens of other people on the platform remain uninvolved–wringing their hands or looking the other way, but doing nothing to help.
Kei thinks it’s cool that he may get to see someone die, but when Masaru spots him and calls him by name, Kei is momentarily shamed into climbing down to help.
Seconds later, they are both dead, smashed to bloody pieces by a train just after heaving the drunk out of harm’s way.
But the story has just begun, as the pair find themselves not in heaven or hell, but in an unfurnished Tokyo apartment with several other people who have just died. One is a teenage girl who committed suicide in a bathtub, and who materializes before Kei’s goggling eyes in the nude.