UTSURO NO HAKO TO ZERO NO MARIA

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CAST

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REVIEWS

• 

  Tricquester

  100/100
  Unapologetic beautiful chaos. A psychological thriller and romance for the ages.

  If I say reviewing this is difficult to put into words, it's because there are both too many and not enough words to express how magnificent this series is. I started reading this at the end of my workweek (Friday morning) and finished all seven novels by Sunday morning that same weekend. Then, I reread the series again over that next week. HakoMari is most definitely the best light novel series I've ever read. It's not too drawn out, but it has enough content to stick in your memory. The beginning of the series focuses on Kazuki’s adamance about maintaining normalcy in his day to day life. The degree to which he works for that result is literally the core of his character, dictating all his actions and goals. Then, we have the main heroine Maria, the literary embodiment of altruism. She will give life and limb to attain happiness for everyone but herself, and if she can’t achieve that via her actions, she does so by granting others a wish, but at a cost. The focus on the relationship and trust between these two established in the first volume becomes the foundation of the series. Maria’s inability to lose herself to her goal because of her relationship with Kazuki, and his truly warped desire for normalcy eventually encompassing Maria is the catalyst for most of the character development. The psychological warfare between O, the antagonist, and our two heroes ends up causing no shortage of harm to those involved, and at one point you truly get to witness the hero live long enough to become the villain as Kazuki descends into madness. As you read through the series a sense of depravity is displayed in a way that can be seen anywhere you look. Tackling dark subject matter in a way that causes one to reflect on the lessons each arc has to offer has influenced my way of thinking a lot. Death, distrust, betrayal, and the silver linings between them are considered in each of the volumes, culminating in both a heartbreaking and emotionally liberating experience. It left me speechless when I read it, but since then I’ve only had praise to give. My words do not do this series justice by any means but saying HakoMari has kept me up at night is no exaggeration. It has provided me with food for thought, intrigue, and one of the most beautiful emotional train wrecks I have ever had the pleasure of consuming. It is truly a mistake to overlook this series, and I only regret not having read it sooner.

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• 

  Josso

  50/100
  HakoMari reads as a wish for a masterpiece dark thriller, made by someone with little faith it could be done

  This review contains spoilers, mostly for the first volume

  I usually avoid writing reviews, mostly because I’m a little embarrassed by them. Maybe I just don’t have the self-confidence to think I have anything worthy of saying, and I’m taking it out on everyone who does. Nevertheless, reading HakoMari made me want to write a review, so I’ll do it.

  I’m a big fan of thrillers and mysteries, I really am. As such, when I came upon HakoMari, and saw how highly-rated it was, I grew a little excited, thinking I’d find something truly special, or at least pretty good. I had no reason to think it just “wasn’t for me”. So I guess I should come out and say that I didn’t really like it at all.

  I think the first thing about this novel that jumps out is that it’s “edgy”, but that’s a very vague word, and not really a negative in and of itself. There’s nothing inherently wrong with things vaguely considered “edgy”: blood, gore, death, angst, insanity, all that can be very powerful tools in a skilled writer’s hands. When it turns into a problem, however, is when that violence is gratuitous, and HakoMari’s violence tends to be very gratuitous.

  Nearly every named female character is either raped, assaulted, or threatened with rape and assault at some point. Some unnamed ones, as well. There’s a lot of killing, a lot of dying, a lot of descriptions of limbs bent at “impossible angles”, a lot of people going insane and collapsing under the weight of their own sins, yet it never feels like that violence is communicating anything important. A natural reaction is to say that this is supposed to show us the “dark side of humanity”, but it ends up as an alternative universe in which 20% of all teenagers are willing to kill people for supervillain reasons. Not the darkness of humanity, but the whims of an author.

  No, I think there’s a much simpler reason: the imagery is shocking. It pulls you in. The intensity of those descriptions of gore and those traumatic situations gives you the feeling that you’re reading something important. It makes you realize this book is quite mature and serious, indeed. Would a children’s book have descriptions of brains splattering? The rudest thing I could say about it is that it’s media for pre-teens who think they’re consuming media for adults.

  But death and rape isn’t all HakoMari is made of. It’s also full of love! (Now, admittedly, I’m not exactly a romance expert, but y’know, anime fans, land of the blind and all)

  To HakoMari, romance is about an unbreakable, eternal bond. It’s about being destined to one another, being hopeless without their presence. That’s the truest, most beautiful form of love. But one can’t help but notice how unhealthy HakoMari’s two main romances really are. They describe this level of pure dependency that is beyond unhealthy. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the problem is that the story doesn’t see anything wrong with that. They all end up together in the end, and that is explicitly their happy ending. There’s little room to say it’s “supposed to be messed up”, it’d be like watching a racist movie and concluding it’s an anti-racist movie because you, the viewer, were personally disgusted by it. It’s a little harder to invoke Death of the Author when the novels make its messages as clear as day, and let me tell you, HakoMari has little time for subtlety.

  Which leads me to my next point, and it’s a bit of a minor complaint, but the prose is often so, so infantilizing. This mostly comes in the form of italicizing any detail that might be important and seems just a little too subtle for the reader to catch. But it’s also clear in the way characters will often just explain their motivations, their trauma, or whatever drives them in no uncertain terms, with very little room for guessing or thinking about it. At some point, this style of writing starts to grate on you, it’s like Wikipedia entries written in a slight poetic tone. In the hands of a better author this could read as theatrical and interesting, but here, where characters really don’t have anything that interesting to them, it’s just exhausting.

  But HakoMari’s gravest sin isn’t any of that. It’s how unremarkable it is. There’s a bunch of other things you could say about it in a review like this, about its protagonist and the several girls who are in love with him by the end of the story because He’s Nice, about the poor (though sparse) attempts at comedy, about the unnecessary horniness that often pervades it (one particular scene in the fifth volume was almost unreadable to me, readers will know which one it is), but I found myself with nothing to say. At the end of the day, those parts of it are no different from any of the other thousands of interchangeable manga and anime that have done the same. HakoMari rarely distinguishes itself from its peers, and though I’m not a fan of judging other people’s tastes, it confounds me how it’s rated so highly. I could write a thousand lines that’d make me sound like an Angry Nerd Youtuber about how this is awful, it sucks, it’s made to spite me, but really, the bulk of it is mediocre. That may be even worse.

  I’d like to conclude with the most notable moment in the books for me. It happens in the first volume, and I will have to spoil it, no way around that. At this point in the story, Maria and Kazuki are searching for the true owner of the Rejecting Classroom Box, and the book cuts to a different narrator. A girl, who mentions she acts cheerful despite being deeply lonely, that she is in love with Kazuki, and wished for this box so she could stay with him. This narration is meant to imply a friend of Kazuki, Kokone Kirino, is the true owner. The scene changes. Kazuki receives a call from Kirino saying she must tell him something, but it cuts before we can learn what. This is meant to imply that Kokone Kirino is the true owner. This goes on, there’s a few more examples of it, but cutting to the chase, it’s revealed at the last second that the true owner is a different character entirely.

  It was notable to me for a few reasons. The first is that it’s communicated really poorly. I actually had to reread it a few times to even know what it was trying to do. But the main reason is that it’s so… pointless. There’s nothing to be gained from a twist like this, and yet so much effort was put into it. There’s no message, no real surprise, and it makes you realize this is just the work of some author, writing words in a way that’ll withhold information from you for no reason other than the surprise of revealing it. It’s just clumsy set dressing to give you the impression that something smart is going on. And it’s a microcosm for the entire series.

  When you understand the purpose of that twist, the rest of the illusion starts to fall apart as well. The blood, the gore, the seemingly purposeless rape and assault? All part of building an image, the aesthetic of a mature show with none of the substance that’d actually make it enjoyable. All the talk of people being “destined to each other forever” starts feeling less like the author’s real views on love, and more like the most dramatic way you could write a romantic plot. All of the drama, none of the substance.

  Hell, even explicitly purposeful things begin to feel like pointless set-dressing. Those long, tedious monologues about the nature of each character, how they’re twisted and dark in whatever ways start feeling purposeless because the novels don’t have anything interesting to say about it, nor an interesting way of presenting it. I’ve read Fate/Stay Night before. I don’t need this. It’s character analysis with none of the substance.

  Really, the best way I can describe HakoMari is that it’s a lot like one of its Boxes. It feels like someone wished for a dark thriller mystery story, with all the meaning and intensity one could ask for, but their lack of faith in their wish made it come out twisted and malformed. Not a mature, grim masterpiece, but something that looks like it. One can only hope that, like an internal-type box, I’ll lose my memories of it once I’m free from its clutches.

  Or not. That’s kind of a Youtuber thing to say. It wasn’t that bad.

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• 

  notPara

  100/100
  "There's no despair that can't be overcome by everyday life"

  "Do you have a wish?"
  "If your wish can be granted by a box, would you use it?"

  The Empty Box and Zeroth Maria is a dark story about a wish granting device that causes trouble for the protagonist Hoshino Kazuki and the people around him. The Empty Box and Zeroth Maria is a crazy, reckless and downright combine it with emotional rollercoaster ride. It's like you throwing a bunch of different characters into one room while telling them "Now do what you want."

  The story always made you questioning like "Why did you do that?" or "What is the reason you doing something like this?" and so on. The story is not all about thriller or mystery. It also deals with topic such as human nature through its characters. While some stay true to their ideals and nature throughout the story whereas others grow out of their comfort zone, losing their humanity aspects just for the sake of their wish to be granted. The author perfectly executed the philosophical complexity of human nature with the environment the characters interact in. What makes this possible is how the author designed the functionality of a plot device called boxes.

  Boxes in the story allow the user to make any wish perfectly how they perceive it, including their doubt. This sort of concept gives the author the liberty to throw the characters into all sorts of creative scenarios without the reader feeling like the situation is unnatural. That concept leading us to the main theme of the series, wishes. I've learnt several things from this series and what i believe a particularly more definitive understanding the concept of a wish and the similarities and differences with a goal.

  This series is really went down deep with the theme and how some of the most amazing aspects of humans is like the flip side of a coin and can also be the darkest parts of human nature. Without going into a bunch of spoilers, i can only say that each volume here has its own story about some kind of mystical phenomenon caused by the boxes. Each volume tells about how the wishes that is usually fill with happiness turn up into a dark one.

  Not gonna go in-depth with every volume but i can say that volume 1 is one of the best introduction i've ever seen in any kind piece of entertainment. It gave you many feelings such as confusion, amazed and can get you surprised by how amazing it introduce the theme, the concept, the world etc. Volume 3-4 and 5-6 are pairs of "connected" volumes because the event that happened in the first of them (3 and 5) doesn't end but continues in the next volume (4 and 6). And volume 7 yeah it's a pinnacle of writing that made my jaw dropped to the floor (if you know you know).

  I can also add that with each volume you are imbued with the concept more and more. Reading it becomes more interesting, more likely due to the fact that after volume 2, the plot in the following volumes becomes stronger. As well as the amount of philosophy and moral that the author is very fond of emphasizing because they significantly influence the plot itself, which is not mystical but also keeps you in suspense right up to the end of each volume.

  Another thing that made The Empty Box and Zeroth Maria unforgettable is the characters and my goodness they always surpass my expectations. Characters who love each other but end up hurting each other. Characters who hate each other but end up realizing how much they resemble each other. Most of them are incredible and unique to their role. We get to see how much their personality change when the fate of someone else is depends on their decision. You'll also meet characters who at first look will not affect the plot but then you will realize that you're pretty much mistaken by that thought. Most of the characters are well developed, as how their backstories such as tragic pasts, how they deal with the boxes, their involvement on mind games, ulterior motives, and how their personality changes as more boxes involved around their life. I think almost every characters tend to have a spoilery stories so i also avoid to tell it more. Such tragedy happened in almost every characters and i'm not gonna lie here, some of them nearly made me cry.

  In conclusion, The Empty Box and Zeroth Maria is a work that contained not only a story that was brilliant but also a work that contained a lot of philosophy topics about real life and moral in general. From the ending itself, i learnt that we never can turn away from reality no matter how cruel it is. The Empty Box and Zeroth Maria is definitely one of my favorite story in general and i'm glad to experienced such an emotional ride from beginning to end.

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