Fittingly enough, we end this month on a distinctly spooky school, which has become the site of a very strange mystery.
A SCHOOL FROZEN IN TIME (Tsumetai Kosha no Toki wa Tomeru), based on the novels by Mizuki Tsujimura with art by Naoshi Arakawa. First published in 2007 and first published in North America in 2021.
PLOT:
It was seemingly just another snowy school day for Hiroshi, Mizuki, and their circle of friends. It takes a while for them to realize that they are trapped in the school with no one else around, no cell phone service, and no way to get out of the building. Stranger still, all their watches and clocks stop at the same time and mysterious messages start appearing on the chalkboards and coming through their phones. It all seems to be tied to the suicide of a classmate three months prior, a classmate who has seemingly disappeared from their photos and memories. In order to rediscover
STORY:
A School Frozen in Time is many things: a closed-room mystery, a ghost story, a coming of age drama. That's a lot of genres to balance all at once, but for the most part it manages to balance them all adeptly. If only it had a cast worthy of such a premise and atmosphere.
What struck me the most about A School Frozen in Time is the subtilty of its horror. The whole book is infused with a sleepy, snowy atmosphere which makes the horror elements all the more shocking. Those moments of horror seem to sneak up on the cast (and by extension the audience), making them all the more shocking when they do occur. It's enough to make you flip back a few pages, to see if you missed clues to its coming. When combined with the slow-looming feeling of dread as the kids truly begin to comprehend their situation, it makes for some tense reading.
It's a good thing that this manga is so atmospheric because the rest of the writing is a bit of a let-down. Tsujimura answers the mystery of the forgotten classmate a bit too soon (and I managed to guess which cast member it was correctly). From that point the story splits in two, as the ghostly one begins to remember the day of their suicide while the rest of the kids look for them and try to piece things together. The former gives that character a lot of nuance, exploring the connections and relationships they had with other students and staff leading up to that fateful day, but with an unintended side effect of highlighting how shallow the rest of the cast is.
Hiroshi and Mizuki might be our ostensible protagonists, but beyond their being Childhood Best Friends I couldn't tell you a good goddamn thing about them. Their friends might as well have "Comic Relief" stamped on their foreheads, with Sugawara serving as the requisite Loud Tough Guy and Rika as the Token Gal. They are characters without character, there more to set the mystery in motion than to make an impression in their own right. That makes it all the harder to care what happens to them as things get increasingly strange and ghoulish, which ultimately undercuts what should otherwise be an intriguingly moody mystery.
ART:
This isn't the first time I've looked at a Naoshi Arakawa manga, although this is the earliest of them by far. It's definitely not as polished as the art in Your Lie in April. The faces can be kind of flat and featureless (especially when viewed from odd angles) and sometimes the proportions of the eyes on characters can get a little wonky. That said, their storyboarding and paneling is simple but smart. She's able to visually build the tension in something as simple as an unexpected phone call and the spooky emptiness of the school halls. It's not enough to save the story, but it's definitely helping to make up for some of its deficiencies.
RATING:
This series is published by Kodansha Comics, under the Vertical Comics imprint. This series is complete in Japan with 4 volumes available. All 4 have been released and are currently in print.
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