Shy Aki is struggling with her perfect older brother’s death.  Her parents offer little aid in recovery, and she constantly feels the pressure of comparisons to her dead sibling, both externally and internally imposed.  As a victim of escalating bullying, she retreats further and further into silence and shadows.  Her longing for her brother’s protection is threaded through every scene as she sinks farther and farther away from reality.  Then suddenly up pops Kai: a confident, brash girl who swaggers through Aki’s life, dealing out justice to her tormentors.  The problem is: where did Kai come from?  As Aki experiences longer and longer periods of blackout, it becomes all too clear that her savior may be very close indeed.  Is it her brother’s spirit come back to defend her?  Or is she simply losing her mind?  Does it matter, if in some small way she can get her brother back?

Sho Murase fills her pages with swirls of gray tones, blacks, and lines with remarkable style, and depends a lot on her superlative sense of design to carry the emotional weight of the story.  The dialog and text retreads a familiar tale of dual personalities, but the art elevates it into a moody examination of isolation and the need for a hero.  ME 2, a psychological mystery, will appeal to teens who want something a little less frothy than the usual manga romance.  The mystery is not so much who Kai is but more how her presence will affect Aki’s place the in world and her recovery from grief.

Originally written for No Flying, No Tights, a graphic novel review website