I picked up Kieli off the shelf at Barnes and Noble based on the cover art, the jacket copy, and a brief glance through the pages. Actually, I looked at the book three or four times during separate visits before finally relenting and dropping the bucks for it at the front counter.

I simply couldn't resist the art and the concept.

Written by Yukako Kabei, the Kieli manga is an adaptation of Kabei-sensei's light novel series by the same name. For this manga version, Kabei-sensei teamed with artist Shiori Teshirogi to adapt earlier illustrations for the novels to a refined and repeatable style.

Kieli, like many Japanese mangas, is slipstream in nature. The plot combines a slow-ship established human colony with characters who are spiritually aware and can see the spirits of departed people around them. In addition, an element of transhumanism is added by the second main character, Harvey, who is an Undying, a human corpse re-animated via the use of now-lost technology to fight a war that's 80-years gone in the past.

As a purveyor of slipstream stories, I enjoy the way the Japanese will gather together what would normally be a pile of over used and cliché ideas and still manage to imbue originality on the final product. Kieli goes beyond this, however. Although many aspects of the story are familiar to those who have read any significant amount of manga or seen more that a few anime, Kieli is fresh in terms of its cohesive plot, well-defined characters, and professional approach to telling its story.

Kieli, the main character, is a fourteen year-old orphan attending a private school. Her world is one where "the church" wields inordinate power and where stories about the "Undying" are used to frighten misbehaving children into compliance. Kieli also has a special ability. She can see the ghost of people who linger in the world.

Of course, it is inevitable that she will eventually run across Harvey, a wandering Undying soldier who has managed to avoid the Church's efforts to exterminate all of his kind. Harvey, it turns out, can not only see spirits just like Kieli, but is actually on his way with "The Corporal", a disembodied spirit housed in an old radio, to return to the tunnel where the Corporal's life ended. The two inevitably end up traveling together, growing closer as their shared experiences build a bond between them.

I find a couple of assumptions that are made in Kieli to be telling in terms of how often they pop up in Japanese popular media. The first is the odd juxtaposed interpretation of Christianity as some sort of cohesive, shadowy organization, whether bonded for good or evil depends on what mechanic is needed for the story. As the most secular and atheist nation on earth, I find it vaguely amusing how ill-conceived so many of their perceptions are like, for example, assuming that the "Church" is uniformly monolithic or completely missing the point of redemption. I'm sure that this sort of lingering misconception is no doubt similar to how Americans view Shinto. Still, the tendency to identify the "bad guys" as the Church is telling.

Also transparent is the "mankind rapes the world" environmental assumptions. As an outsider, I have no idea where this attitude originates from. I assume that it's a combination of overcrowding, dwindling access to wild areas, and, perhaps, even some fallout from the ending of World War II. Regardless, many, many manga and anime share the same assumption that mankind will pollute and ruin the world, driving civilization to catastrophe along the way, but always in a Japanese way which really has to be experienced in multiple ways before you get a "feel" for the specific attitude. The weakness of the environmental collapse assumption, of course, is that people never change or adapt in time to address the concern. Call it a recurring peeve on my part.

Regardless of those recurring assumptions, Kieli offers wonderful art, well developed characters, and a cohesive plot that drives the story purposefully forward. It is not given to gags or "fan service", instead presenting a meaningful and well-conceived story in the best possible light for the media.

I heartily recommend it.

Darwin A. Garrison