Ballad of a Shinigami, Vol. 1
By K-Ske Hasegawa & Asuka Izumi
Published by CMX

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Review by Megan M.

This manga is based on a series of light novels, licensed in English by Seven Seas, which has also been adapted into an anime, though I don’t believe the anime has been licensed. While the manga is shoujo, I believe the light novels are considered shounen.

Momo is a Shinigami, a death god. Her appearance is that of an attractive young woman in a white dress, with white hair and a white scythe. She’s accompanied by her partner, Daniel, who is a talking, winged cat. While a Shinigami’s job is to guide people to the afterlife when they die, Momo seems to spend most of her time guiding people away from death and delivering final messages of the deceased.

Sadly, after the brief prologue, we see very little of Momo. While it’s a standard of the subgenre I like to call “mysterious shopkeepers” that centers around a mysterious, supernatural entity that somehow changes the lives of various kinds of clients to initially focus very little on the mysterious person and to instead focus on the clients, most will at least give you a good feel for the personality of the central character. Here, we learn little about Momo as a person save that she likes to help people. There are hints that she’s different from other Shinigami in more than appearance (the glimpses we get of other Shinigami are the classic black clad grim reapers) and that she may have become a Shinigami after committing suicide, but there’s no solid feel for the character.

The individual stories–a brief prologue about a youth grieving the loss of a best friend, a boy from an abusive home who comes to realize a classmate may have equally bad problems, a boy still grieving his sister who begins to wonder if a classmate has problems, and a girl whose childhood love grew up very differently from what whe’d expected–are brief but effective, if not long enough for me to really develop concern about the principles. I was a bit worried when the first two main stories seemed to be “angsty boy tries to figure out girl’s angst,” but the third major story thankfully broke that trend. (Not that I have a problem with “angsty boy tries to figure out girl’s angst,” but a succession of such stories tends to lose the appeal.)

In the end, this is an enjoyable read that reminds me a bit of a cross between “Hell Girl” and “Someday’s Dreamers” but it never manages to be a particularly engaging one. I’m much more interested in learning about Momo and what makes her different than I am about the various people she saves, but at three volumes, I’m not sure the manga is long enough to get into that. It is, however, a much more uplifting volume than the first volumes of most series like it.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

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