is a Japanese

manga Manga ( Japanese: 漫画 ) are comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Most manga conform to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century, and the form has a long prehistory in earlier Japanese art. The term ''manga'' is use ...

written by

Nagaru Tanigawa is a Japanese author. He is a graduate of the law school at Kwansei Gakuin University. He is best known as the creator of the ''Haruhi Suzumiya'' series for which he won the grand prize at the eighth annual Sneaker Awards and has been adapted int ...

and illustrated by Natsumi Kohane. It was serialized in

ASCII Media Works ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

's '' Dengeki Bunko Magazine'' beginning in June 2008. The individual chapters were collected into two ''

tankōbon is the Japanese term for a book that is not part of an anthology or corpus. In modern Japanese, the term is most often used in reference to individual volumes of a manga series: most series first appear as individual chapters in a weekly or m ...

'' volumes, which were released on August 10, 2009, and December 18, 2009. The manga is licensed in North America by

Seven Seas Entertainment Seven Seas Entertainment is an American publishing company located in Los Angeles, California. It was originally dedicated to the publication of original English-language manga, but now publishes licensed manga and light novels from Japan, as w ...

, which released the two volumes on February 2, 2011, and June 7, 2011. It has also been licensed in Taiwan by Kadokawa Media.

Reception

Manga Bookshelf's Katherine Dacey lists ''Amnesia Labyrinth'' as the fifth worst manga of 2011. Anime News Network's Carlo Santos commends the manga with its "deceptive leads and clues" and "calm, down-to-earth portrayal of home and school". However, he criticizes that Kohane's use of "careful shading, clean linework" serves to hide the "slightly off-kilter character designs and stiff facial expressions." A later review by Santos commends the manga for its

logic puzzle A logic puzzle is a puzzle deriving from the mathematical field of deduction. History The logic puzzle was first produced by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who is better known under his pen name Lewis Carroll, the author of ''Alice's Adventures in W ...

s and its use of "long silences, where the things unsaid between characters make it far more intriguing than any dialogue could have." With regards to the art, Santos commends Kohane for "using lots of hatched lines and ominous shading to create a different era where a supernatural back-story adds new layers to the series" but criticizes him for being inconsistent "when it comes to basic character design and anatomy". Mania's Matthew Warner commends the manga's artwork with "the artwork provided looks fantastic, and is definitely one of the book’s main draws. Character designs look solid and display emotion well (though there is one instance in which a character strips that looks a little off, for whatever reason). However, the real star is the backgrounds and environments throughout, which appear often and have something of a stylized, sketchy feel to them, and are usually quite complex."

School Library Journal ''School Library Journal'' (''SLJ'') is an American monthly magazine containing reviews and other articles for school librarians, media specialists, and public librarians who work with young people. Articles cover a wide variety of topics, with ...

's Snow Wildsmith commends Kohane's sharp artwork "full of feral smiles and vulpine eyes." She recommends the manga to the fans of psychological manga such as ''

After School Nightmare is a Japanese shōjo manga, manga series written and illustrated by Setona Mizushiro. It was serialized from 2004 to 2007 in the List of manga magazines, manga magazine ''Princess (magazine), Princess'' and collected in ten volumes. It was ...

'' and ''

Higurashi When They Cry is a Japanese murder mystery dōjin soft visual novel series produced by 07th Expansion that comprises the first two entries of the ''When They Cry'' franchise. The series focuses on a group of young friends living in the ficti ...

''. Dacey heavily pans the "source material; as writer Nagaru Tanigawa explains in the afterword to volume one, Amnesia Labyrinth was “based on a story that, while it didn’t have enough to become a full-fledged novel, had been kicking around in my head for years.” He admitted that he had to “dismantle” his original idea and “reinvent the characters”; small wonder that the published version was, by his own admission, filled with “lazy, phantom passages,” vestiges of an earlier story idea."

List of volumes

References

External links

* 2009 manga ASCII Media Works manga Mystery anime and manga Seven Seas Entertainment titles Shōnen manga {{manga-stub