Volumes: 1/1 Omnibus (Complete), In Print
Seinen
Genre: Ero-guro, Horror, Dark Comedy
Summary: Eight Middle School teens including their Leader, Zara, are the members of the Light Lychee Club, a sort of neo-Nazi cult. They kill to steal body parts for their Frankenstein-like creation, named Lychee, that has a mechanical brain like a robot, but survives on Lychee fruits for fuel. Zara, obsessed with ultimate beauty but repulsed by adulthood, wants Lychee to capture a young beautiful girl. After some failures, Lychee captures the beautiful school girl, Kanon. While things are going well for the Light Lychee Club, Zara has prophesied that one of them will betray him.
Review: So this work is a subgenre of Horror called Ero-guro. Ero-guro is defined as manga that are a mix of erotic and grosteque. Another way to describe it would be psychologically twisted horror that’s very depraved, very gross and deliberately pushes the boundaries of what’s acceptable.
Personally, while I’m a big fan of Usamaru Furuya, I don’t really care for Ero-guro at all. In some ways as a genre it’s more interested in being shocking or edgy or disturbing more than being about the story or characters. But I do find them interesting as underground comics and experimental works.
Anyway, Light Lychee Club, as an Ero-guro work, is a deliberately fucked up manga that centers around the more-or-less cultists, the newly functional and innocent Frankenstein/robot Lychee, and the only normal character, school girl Kanon. The story becomes about the Light Lychee Club’s path to self-destruction, as prophesied by Zara.
Compared to Usamaru Furuya’s other works, this one is decidedly underground. As mainstream works go, I would really recommend his Genkaku Picasso or No Longer Human over this for new readers. Also the Music of Marie is his most popular work overall, but still only available in scanlation.
Recommended: This is a deliberately shocking work of twisted horror that contains a lot of disturbing behavior. It is probably of most interest to Ero-guro fans, or Horror fans looking for something twisted.
Not Recommended: In a lot of ways this manga reminds me of the darkest corners of the internet. It’s one of the most messed up manga published in English. I do not recommend this to regular readers, and especially not casual manga readers. Read his other works instead.
Rating: R: I was going to list all the possibly objectionable stuff readers might find here, but it seems way faster just to list what isn’t objectionable, which is the pure relationship between Kanon and the Frankenstein/robot Lychee. Anyway this is really more for hardcore horror/ero-guro fans than casual readers.
Other Works in English by this Mangaka: Genkaku Picasso, No Longer Human (adapted from the novel by Osamu Dazai), Palepoli (short story in Secret Comics Japan) and Short Cuts
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