Heavenly Delusion

is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Masakazu Ishiguro. It has been serialized in Kodansha's manga magazine ''Monthly Afternoon'' since January 2018 and its chapters have been collected in 11 volumes as of October 2024.

The manga has two narratives; in one narrative, the characters Maru and Kiruko travel across a post-apocalyptic world to reach an area called "Heaven"; in the other, a group of children live in a school their superiors call "Heaven". The series was inspired by a manga Ishiguro read in university; he intended to make ''Heavenly Delusion'' different from his previous work, ''And Yet the Town Moves'', portraying a proper dynamic between the two leads and the evil they face. ''Heavenly Delusion'' has themes of gender and natural disasters, which were inspired by Ishiguro's personal feelings.

An anime television series adaptation produced by Production I.G aired from April to June 2023.

The manga has been received positively, and was praised for its sense of mystery and the relationship between the characters from both scenarios presented at the same time. It has also won several accolades such as the Japan Expo Awards.

Plot

Fifteen years after an unprecedented disaster destroyed modern civilization, a group of children live in a facility isolated from the outside world. One day, a girl named Tokio, receives a message that says: "Do you want to go outside of the outside?" Mimihime, another girl who lives in the same facility, has a premonition and tells the upset Tokio two people will come from the outside to save her, one of whom has the same face as her, while the school's director tells Tokio the outside world is Hell. A boy named Maru, who looks just like Tokio, is traveling through post-apocalyptic Japan with his bodyguard, a girl named Kiruko, in search of Heaven. Maru is looking for a person who has his face, and he and Kiruko often encounter thieves and ''kaiju''-like creatures they call "man-eaters". While Kiruko is a skilled fighter when dealing with enemies, she also mentors Maru who has an unknown power that allows him to instantly destroy the man-eaters. The narrative constantly switches between Heaven and Hell, expanding each side of characters.

Production

Development

After Masakazu Ishiguro ended ''And Yet the Town Moves'', he spent around a year devising a new series. Ishiguro was inspired by the early era of Japan, and relationships between humans and artificial intelligence when planning to write ''Heavenly Delusion''. The original concept was devised in 2013 as concept art for the cover of the magazine ''Monthly Comic Ryū'' (2013). There were unintentional similarities to Ishiguro's favorite work, '' Akira'', such as the post-apocalyptic setting, and the dynamic between Maru and Kiruko. Ishiguro decided to keep drawing the manga like ''Akira'', paying close attention to the backgrounds and the way the leads try eating. Ishiguro aimed to properly write "evil" in contrast to ''And Yet the Town Moves'', so the post-apocalyptic world of ''Heavenly Delusion'' is far darker than his previous works'.

After drawing sketches of young characters suitable for the manga demographic, editorial members from ''Afternoon'' asked Ishiguro to write for their magazine again. In contrast to ''And Yet the Town Moves'', ''Heavenly Delusion'' employs a dark tone, specifically children's delusions. He still wanted returning fans to read ''Heavenly Delusion''. One of the child characters, Tokio, lives in a mysterious facility, and enjoys and collects fantasy paintings her friend Kona creates. Kona can imagine things he had never seen before; this aspect overlaps with Ishiguro's statement he is drawing delusions. At the end of the first volume, many of the plot threads have been laid out but to maintain the mystery theme, a few events are directly foreshadowed.

Ishiguro devised the manga when he was a university student. The story is based on the story of a race on a circuit; the Earth is destroyed in the middle of the race and the main character is about to die. For the title, Ishiguro wanted to use wordplay to create ambiguity. The Japanese characters of Heaven where use to connect with "Hell" in the title. Ishiguro claims his artwork became more detailed, most notably Kiruko's facial expression. Once reaching its ending, Ishiguro planned whether to make the title explicit. The man-eaters, -like creatures Maru and Kiruko fight, are based on prehistoric creatures such as Cambrian-period organisms; their shapes are often designed to appeal to Ishiguro's drawing style. He had been drawing science fiction themes since his childhood and continues exploring them in ''Heavenly Delusion''; they were influenced by the late manga duo Fujiko Fujio.

Ishiguro thought about the manga for years. Because he enjoyed walking, he often fantasized about a world that had been destroyed by a catastrophe and found himself inspired by an anime in which the main character wandered alone, like Chirico from ''Armored Trooper Votoms''. He liked the idea of a hero traveling alone through a desert in combat armor, which inspired the leads. At the beginning, he planned to depict a desert-like world. When the first volume was released, the company Minami Kamakura Film Commission provided a video promotion; they had previously released a video with music by Kenshi Yonezu, with the same image: Miku in a jacket against a desert. Ishiguro decided to change the plot and returned to an urban setting, though it was difficult to draw backgrounds with a large number of buildings. The concept of the academy was modeled after Yumeno Kyusaku's novel '' Dogura Magura''. The original length of the manga was extended because Ishiguro found the ending weak. While working on the series, Ishiguro sometimes has to completely rewrite panels or correct a script to turn it into the best version.

The sibling-like dynamic between Maru and Miruko was based on Ishiguro's personal life. He was inspired by an event in which he noticed a person who was interested in his sister. Another aspect of the protagonists' dynamic was inspired by buddy films. Maru's design is based on Kon from ''And Yet the Town Moves'', and is inspired by the way ''JoJo's Bizarre Adventure''s eighth story arc '' JoJolion'' reuses previous characters. In the beginning, Maru has feelings for Kiruko without knowing his bodyguard is a man inside a girl's body. Ishiguro called this premise "transsexual sci-fi", alluding to the possibility of Maru still loving Kiruko despite knowing the truth.

Themes

When Ishiguro started writing ''Heavenly Delusion'', he felt discomfort about events in Japan. Around 2017 and 2018, Japan was looking for flaws in its governance in the run-up to the 2020 Summer Olympics. Ishiguro personally experienced a case of because of the scandal with the empty New Year's food and wanted the handling of meals to be properly shown in his work. At that time, the country also experienced earthquakes and tsunamis. Sensing an ominous similarity between that time and the present, Ishiguro wanted to convey the sense of threat the society increasingly felt. The credo of the series is to be cautious, lest may encounter something truly terrible. The character of Totori was written to prove people who can easily be seen as villains are important to others; Totori is friendly with Maru and Kiruko to the point she attempts to seduce Maru who rejects her. In the aftermath, the duo learn that Totori belongs to a gang who had been chasing them in the past days and died, leaving her all alone. While reading the manga, Ishiguro wanted the reader to experience fear. One the manga's central themes is the most-minimal "heaven" for people is to "feel extremely comfortable in their own field of vision"; if a manga continues this search for "heaven" too much, the place will come across as a "hell". The concept of looking for heaven is the biggest moral of the series.

Ishiguro wanted to tell the story of a girl's body that contains the brain of her younger brother, but he does not remember when the idea came to him. He was inspired by stories of brothers and sisters, so he wanted to create his own story about a brother and a sister swapping places. He rejected coincidences related to magic and wanted to create a more-realistic world to show what might happen after a brain transplant. He opposed the idea of a man turning into a woman, leading to jokes about cleavage and lacking a penis. Instead, with Kiruko, he wanted the scenario to be more realistic. Another theme is a change in relationships in the event of a sex change. Ishiguro often writes metaphorical situations; Kiruko's menstrual cycle is caused by a clash with Maru's lips when awakening from a hallucination from a Hiruko's attack. Kiruko represents a gradation of spiritual sexuality. The school is depicted as a kind of thought experiment in a world where sexual elements are abolished.

In the book ''Critical Posthumanities'', Maru and Kiruko are called posthuman characters based on the commentaries from Francesca Fernando; Maru possesses an outstanding physical shape that allows to fight older people all alone and easily recover from wounds that do not work on common people like regrowing a tooth he loses when being attacked. As the series progresses, it is revealed Maru is one of the first humans born with the nature to eliminate Hirukos just like him. The apparent lack morals Kiruko and Maru display in the series were noted for being allowed a woman to let a man-eater confused that might be her late son living as a man-eater. Maru's design includes a black jacket that contains "We are neither machines nor game pieces". This comes across as a visual resistance throughout the series against the non-consensual corruption of the children who suffer traumas while dealing with their supernatural abilities given by the doctors from Takahara Academy. Maru and Kiruko also show morals about the possible evolution of man-eaters in the first episodes of the anime but such scene ends with failure when one of them kills a woman claiming to be its mother. Kiruko is seen as a "human chimera" due to the nature of their life after the surgery. The writer calls Kiruko "a new person born out of the combination of two bodies and yet a separate existence from them".

Media

Manga

''Heavenly Delusion'' is written and illustrated by Masakazu Ishiguro, and it has been serialized in Kodansha's manga magazine ''Monthly Afternoon'' since January 25, 2018. Kodansha has published its chapters in individual volumes, the first of which was released on July 23, 2018; a promotional video that was directed by Tasuku Watanabe for the first volume was released on the same date. As of October 22, 2024, 11 volumes have been released.

In North America, the series is licensed in English by Denpa. The first volume was released on December 31, 2019.

Anime

A 13-episode anime television series adaptation by Production I.G was aired from April 1 to June 24, 2023, on Tokyo MX and other networks.

Other

An official guidebook for ''Heavenly Delusion'' was released on November 22, 2022. It includes detailed information about the series' setting, story, characters, and features an interview with Ishiguro.

Reception

By December 2018, over 130,000 copies of the ''Heavenly Delusion'' manga were in circulation.

Reviewing the first volume of ''Heavenly Delusion'', Anime News Network praised the narrative for its focus on Kiruko's and Maru's appealing relationship, and Ishiguro's character designs. The reviewer said while the volume explores the mysteries behind Kiruko, there were still too many mysteries the plot would explore in the future. The French website ''Manga News'' called the manga's premise captivating due to the mysteries it shows. ''Sigue en Serie'' also commented on the mysteries of the series, which would motivate readers to quickly move to the next volume to understand more of the plot through the parallel storylines. By the third volume, ''Manga News'' noted the events on the both storylines had been connected, especially from Tokio's point of view, while the duo's journey was noted to be more comic than tragic as a result of the way Ishiguro writes the chapters. The reviewer still felt both plots offer interesting mysteries whose connections are not easily given away. ''Brutus'' magazine listed ''Heavenly Delusion'' on its list of "Most Dangerous Manga", which includes works with the most-stimulating and thought-provoking themes.

Makoto Yukimura, author of the manga '' Vinland Saga'', expressed interest in the themes of ''Heavenly Delusion'' due to the idea of a heaven, as well as the way Ishiguro tells two connected stories at the same time.

Accolades

''Heavenly Delusion'' was ranked first on Takarajimasha's ''Kono Manga ga Sugoi!'' 2019 ranking of Top 20 manga series for male readers. ''Heavenly Delusion'' was one of the Jury Recommended Works at the 24th and 25th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2021 and 2022, respectively. The manga was awarded the French Daruma Award for the Best Screenplay category at the Japan Expo Awards in 2023.

References

External links

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{{Kono Manga ga Sugoi!

Adventure anime and manga
Anime and manga set in schools
Fiction about body swapping
Kodansha manga
Mystery anime and manga
Post-apocalyptic anime and manga
Science fiction anime and manga
Seinen manga
Works about rape