Books: Mermaid Saga

While most of the manga series written by Rumiko Takahashi have large casts of characters, "Mermaid Saga" focuses on the travels of only two people, Yuta and Mana. They have both eaten the flesh of a mermaid and gained immortality, and they wander Japan in search of ... well ... nothing. Unlike immortality fiction like "Highlander," there is no real ultimate goal to speak of here, lending the series a sort of dreamlike continuity. Aside from the very first story introducing Yuta and Mana, "A Mermaid Never Smiles," the various episodes in the comics can be read in any order.

Of course, as they trek across the country, they encounter various twisted monsters and characters, all related somehow to mermaids and their supernatural effects. Takahashi gets a lot of mileage out of the premise, but it's clear that the idea isn't strong enough to sustain a multi-volume epic like InuYasha. The stories are pretty formulaic - Yuta and Mana come upon something weird, they investigate, Bad Stuff happens, and a resolution is reached (seldom a happy one).

Thankfully, some somber artwork and writing make "Mermaid Saga" compelling, with little of the slapstick humor or wordplay that props up Takahashi's other books. The tone here is deathly serious, with good amounts of horror and gore. The small flashes of a budding romance between Yuta and Mana are subtle, but they make sense when the overall atmosphere of the books are taken into account. If you want to see how many scrapes two nearly-unkillable people with eternal youth can get into, "Mermaid Saga" is worth a look.