Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
“Happiness,” Volume One by Shuzo Oshimi, begins with an intense scene of a girl hovering above a street on what looks like an electricity pole. She then jumps on a man and smashes his head to a pulp on the next page. I started reading this horror manga at 1 am but stopped after four pages, which included the gory scene, because I only wanted to read a little before crashing, and the manga looked like something that might prevent me from having a good night’s sleep.
However, when I resumed “Happiness” the next day, it wasn’t the scary horror manga I was expecting it to be. Instead, Happiness is a vampire fantasy about a schoolboy named Makoto Okazaki, who gets bitten by the same monstrous girl we meet in the first page, he then begins to experience strange bodily changes, including an aversion to sunlight.
The first 2-3 pages feature colored panels, leading me to believe this was a color manga, but it’s not, which resulted in a slight pang of disappointment. However, Shuzo Oshimi’s black-and-white artwork is clean and expressive and won me over. The art feels like it belongs in a Shōjo manga, especially in scenes that do not feature violence, so the regular high-school scenes look like they could be out of a slice-of-life romance.
Volume One of “Happiness” seems to suggest that Makoto Okazaki is the protagonist, a nerdy schoolboy who is bullied by his popular classmates, led by a guy called Yuki. The bullying largely comprises asking Okazaki to buy them snacks, a staple bullying tactic you often see in several Japanese and Korean dramas. His only friend is a sweet boy called Nunota, and they aren’t really friends either, Nunota just likes to keep an eye out for Okazaki because he too used to be bullied by the same group until they decided to change their target.
While Okazaki quietly complies with the bullying, things change when he is attacked one night by a strange girl. He survives with a bite mark but begins to feel extremely different physically, leading to quite some personality changes, the most dominant of which is reacting like a hungry animal around girls. Since it’s implied that he is a vampire now, even though he doesn’t realize it yet, the subtext is that he reacts more viscerally to girls who are on their periods.
Due to the cover page featuring a girl, I had very different expectations from the plot and was hoping to see more of the vampire girl who attacks Okazaki. Unlike other horror manga titles I’ve read in the past, “Happiness” is an interesting balance of regular high-school drama and violent vampire fantasy. Okazaki’s family is pretty amusing, especially his over-protective mom, and it would be fun to see how their dynamics play out in future volumes. I don’t have any strong thoughts about Okazaki yet, except that he is an asocial weirdo who gets off by sneaking a peek at the girls in his school. More character development probably awaits him in the next nine issues.
Rating: 3 out of 5.
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