この世の終りへの旅

KONO YO NO OWARI E NO TABI

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
1
RELEASE
August 25, 2003
CHAPTERS
12

DESCRIPTION

Every morning a man wakes up, gets dressed, and heads to work, returning home in the evening to go to sleep. Feeling suffocated by the mundanity and repetitiveness of life, the man takes a detour on his way to work one day. But after being swept up in a tide of piracy, cannibalism, and bizarre religious sects the man starts to wonder: was his boring old life so bad after all?

CAST

Ryokou-sha
Mura no Chourou
Mura no Josei

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

Makarin
60/100
The manga that could've been anything else
Kono Yo no Owari e no Tabi is a manga about a man who decides to go on an adventure to flee from his dull everyday life. On that trip he meets pirates, a tribe of cannibals, a blind Arab, mean Jews and tries to not lose his sanity on the way.
This manga was very strange to read. Not just because of how it was drawn but also because there were no speech bubbles. This might as well have been a novel with pictures to accompany the text. It differs from the usual manga with its art style and the way things are written: everything is read from his perspective and we don't have anything beyond that to read about.
A large part of the manga plays on the island of the cannibals. Their rituals and behaviors are all laid out very nicely, we get to learn about their backstory, their view of cannibalism, how they treat guests and so on, but obviously our protagonist doesn't really want to stick around for reasons of cannibalism. The Arab and the Jews only get like 2 chapters and they weren't really important (except for small spoiler reasons I'll go into later) and the pirates were... forgettable.
This entire manga works (like I said) without any speech bubbles and with an art style, that could barely be farther away from every other manga ever made by someone other than the authors of this work. This could have been a novel, this could've been a short movie, this could've been a damn wattpad story, this could've been anything else but it chose to be a manga without using what mangas typically use for visuals and so on. I think this might be good for those who have a hard time reading mangas lately and for those who want to slowly move away from mangas and start to read "normal" books but I don't think that this work is anything I would recommend as anything other than a bridge.
I certainly don't hate this work but there was a lot of confusion on my part and I don't know yet if this is an example of a new way for mangas to work or just an attempt to do something else and not succeeding in doing so, I will read more works by the same authors though.
Criticism of the story: I do not know what this story was meant to be about. I really don't, because if it was about an absurd trip away from civilization then I don't get why the city got insane afterwards, I don't know what the hell the gatekeepers were meant for and what the unemployment group was supposed to be for. I certainly don't know why the world somehow ended in the end but I'll try to summarize it: after meeting the insanity of uncivilized societies (meaning that they don't do the same "boring" things everyday), our protagonist comes back to find out that he has changed too much to fit in with the civilized society he disliked so much [He went from a normal person who was a bit frustrated to someone who was seen as horrible by his boss (who represents the boring everyday life and replaced him with someone just as boring) and the all-around society (the group he wanted to escape from, only to find out) only to find out that civilization is a myth(I think???) and watch his city burn as soon as it has a reason to do so. That's all I got, I don't know if I'm stupid or if the work is too abstract or maybe just bad, I can't help but be confused about all that.
That being said, I hope you enjoy this manga more than I did and thanks for reading.
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