Ghost in the Shell: Arise ~Sleepless Eye~ Manga Review: Kodansha’s K Manga App is Evil
Now that I’ve watched and reviewed my way through the vast majority of animated adaptations of Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell (GitS), it’s now time to delve into the more obscure depths of the franchise. In no particular order of priority, I decided to first look at the GitS: Arise tie-in manga. Written by franchise veteran Junichi Fujisaku (Blood C, Appleseed XIII) and illustrated by Takumi Oyama, it ran for seven volumes between March 2013 and June 2016. For years it was completely unavailable in English, which seems unbelievable considering GitS’ popularity outside of Japan. However this isn’t the first GitS tie-in manga to fail to reach English-speaking audiences — that dubious honour goes to Yu Kinutani’s Stand Alone Complex: The Laughing Man adaptation.
Thankfully, the Arise manga ~Sleepless Eye~ is now available in English — at least to US readers, courtesy of publisher Kodansha’s K Manga app. K Manga is unfortunately region-locked, which sucks because it has so many good manga on it. When companies like Shueisha and Viz have released their equivalent apps worldwide (Manga+ and Shonen Jump/Viz Manga respectively), I don’t understand Kodansha’s business decisions here. It’s not as if there are complex licensing issues — they publish and distribute their own titles.
Poor availability aside, Kodansha’s other decisions with K Manga have been baffling. Whereas Viz charges users a very fair £2.99/month subscription fee with a 100 chapters/day limit, Kodansha uses a horrendous and overpriced “points” system that in practice acts like the most predatory of gacha games. Every manga chapter requires “points” to unlock/purchase, while some chapters can be “rented” using “Premium” Tickets. Some (usually opening) chapters are free, but many can only be purchased with cash. Premium Tickets can be earned through daily login bonuses, but only temporarily unlock a chapter for 72 hours. Premium Tickets also expire within a few days of acquisition. To read a series using Premium Tickets requires logging in every day, and frantically renting chapters before the tickets expire. It’s quite a stressful way to read manga.
For those chapters with which Premium Tickets won’t work, the only option is to use Points, which are grossly overpriced. Typical chapters cost 69 Points = 69 cents. Considering Arise ~Sleepless Eye~ has 76 “chapters”, that’s over 50 dollars to buy access to a DRM-infected file library that may disappear one day when the app is inevitably shelved. You might as well buy the ebook from Amazon (or other online ebook seller of your choice).
But here’s the rub — Arise ~Sleepless Eye~ is only available to read via K Manga. There is no ebook version. What’s even more egregious is that the Japanese print version of Arise ~Sleepless Eye~ has 42 chapters, so there’s some deeply suspect surgery going on here to chop chapters into tiny monetisable bits. Look at what the app did to Battle Angel Alita’s chapters — most of them have been split into three chunks. That’s over two dollars per chapter if you want to “own” it. (You do not “own” anything in this brave new world of dedicated manga apps. Spending real money here is just another form of rental.)
Note you can also earn points in-app by watching 90-second-long videos, and then clicking on one of three digital treasure chest rewards for a chance at winning “up to 50 points”. I did this a few times and never succeeded at winning any more than 5 points. I estimate at this rate it would take 21 minutes of ad-watching to earn enough points to purchase a single chapter, or almost 27 hours of solid brain-melting ad-watching to earn enough points to unlock the entire story. (Note there is a limit of 150 points per day that can be earned from watching ads…) Alternatively, there are sometimes chapters of other manga that reward the reader with points. For example Rent-a-Girlfriend chapter one grants five points. I reluctantly suffered through that, and feel the ordeal warrants several thousand more points than a measly, inadequate five. I hate that series.
Arise ~Sleepless Eye~ was never even fan-translated (apart from the first six chapters), so there’s no viable piracy option either. If you want to read this manga in English, Kodansha’s K Manga app is the only method. Oh, and if you’re outside of the US you’d better get comfortable using a VPN and getting a US iTunes account (or google equivalent), or there’s no manga for you. I can’t even take screenshots with the damned app, because it’s against the terms of service and Kodansha can ban you if you try, causing you to lose any purchases. It’s just a re-skin of their Japanese app Pocket Magazine. Maybe Japanese people don’t mind being abused by manga publishers, but I hate this.
Each individual manga does have a “Title Ticket” that recharges once daily, so I suppose if you don’t mind taking two and a half months to read through every chapter at a snail’s pace for free, then I suppose you could do that. Alternatively, you know, Kodansha, just publish a bloody print version of Arise ~Sleepless Eye~. Or an ebook. I’d buy either. Anything to avoid the prolonged ordeal that is K Manga, an app designed by retired Guantanamo Bay torturers to extract the maximum amount of anguish while providing the minimum amount of fun.
Anyway, I have eventually succeeded in reading every single chapter of Arise ~Sleepless Eye~, despite the idiotically high bar of entry, by spending as little money as possible. The app seems relatively generous in providing a decent number of Premium Tickets, enough for me to rent/read every chapter within the space of a week, except for the final three chapters, which demand you pay money for them. Despite living in the UK, I do have a US iTunes account (previously required to play Fate/Grand Order), I have access to digital US iTunes gift cards (thank you PlayAsia loyalty points), and I found a fairly decent free iPad VPN that only requires you to watch a dozen braindead ads in the space of a few minutes to grant 24 hours of unrestricted VPN access. This works like a (very clunky, extremely awkward) charm.
All right, that’s enough moaning about Kodansha and their stupid app. What about the actual manga itself? As I mentioned above, writer Junichi Fujisaku is well-acquainted with the GitS franchise, having penned far more GitS manga and prose now than even original creator Masamune Shirow. Fujisaku contributed ten scripts to Stand Alone Complex season one, three scripts to season two, plus the screenplays for both The Laughing Man and Individual Eleven compilation films. Following these, he wrote three Stand Alone Complex novels, published in English by Dark Horse. He supervised the GitS: Arise OVA series and its conclusion The New Movie, while providing a script for Arise: Alternative Architecture episodes 9 and 10 (also known as Arise: Border 5). Latterly, he’s been working on GitS: The Human Algorithm, an ongoing interquel set in the original manga continuity between 1.5: Human Error Processor and 2: Man-Machine Interface. While this is also available to read on their app, Kodansha has also thankfully produced print and ebook versions for purchase outwith K Manga. To my knowledge, Fujisaku is the only writer with prominent input to three distinct segments of GitS canon.
Fujisaku centres his manga adaptation of Arise on the character of Batou, the ex-Ranger with cybernetic eyes who is usually depicted as franchise lead Major Motoko Kusanagi’s trusted right hand man. This isn’t the first iteration of GitS to focus on Batou — director Mamoru Oshii followed an older, more depressed version in Innocence, his divisive sequel to 1995’s watershed Ghost in the Shell movie. However, Arise is something of a prequel story, which although likely separate in continuity from other branches of the franchise, follows our main characters earlier days, prior to and during the initial formation of Public Security Section 9.
While most of the Arise anime is seen through Kusanagi’s eyes, she’s often little more than a supporting character in the Arise manga. This works extremely well — it can be hard for writers to get into Kusanagi’s head, Batou is much more down to Earth and therefore easier to generate empathy for. ~Sleepless Eye~ gets its title from Batou himself, he having sacrificed his biological eyes (along with most of his body) to cyberisation. He argues that doing so increased his chances of battlefield survival, and the first story arc validates that claim.
~Sleepless Eye~ is split into six “Anecdotes”, each divided up into an average of around twelve chapters (at least on K Manga). Following a 50-page long prologue chapter set in the “present” when Kusanagi has completed recruitment of her team but before signing officially with Section 9, the first Anecdote flashes back to the Qhardi/Kuzan civil war so foundational to Arise’s story. It’s here that Batou first encounters the mysterious and deadly Kusanagi while she’s deployed by the Japanese Army’s secret, autonomous unit The 501. Obviously they fight each other!
My first impression was of how accomplished the art was. I can’t dig up any information online about artist Takumi Oyama, nor about any other work he’s done. I wonder if he either uses a pseudonym or just hasn’t had any other notable works translated? Anyway, it’s hyper-detailed, incredibly kinetic, and brutally violent. There are rivers of blood and gore, leaving little misconceptions about the horrors of war. Batou and his crew are used and abused as pawns by politicians and powerful businessmen with vested interests in prolonging this awful civil war as long as possible. Much like its associated anime, the manga views these so-called elites as corrupt monsters.
Kusanagi herself at first appears to be little but a dangerous attack dog, controlled by these elites. Her motives are unclear, and one moment she appears to be on Batou’s side, while on the other she commits apparent atrocities. Although they team up, their mission goes from bad, to worse, to witnessing genocide. They fight massive tanks, Batou gets to fire some Bloody Huge Guns (he likes those), but in the end, Kusanagi’s “owners” come for her. That purple-dreadlocked asshole from the anime? Yeah, he’s still utterly hateful here too. Obviously the Major’s body ends up completely wrecked, and the Anecdote closes off with a direct visual reference to the original movie’s body manufacturing opening sequence, as the Major’s cyberbrain is moved to a new shell.
Anecdote 1 is a really good prequel to the prequel, with no material at all shared with the anime. It works extremely well in context, especially giving Batou believable motivation for his later actions, plus it also helps contextualise some of the anime’s more confusing and undeveloped backstory. Anecdotes 2–5 adapt the anime episodes Borders 1–4 in the original release order (before Alternative Architecture pointlessly muddled things around), but all from Batou’s POV, filling in details I didn’t know needed to be filled in, and adding greatly needed texture and background to what was a rushed, vague and befuddling anime story. Reading the manga retrospectively makes the anime so much better.
This is especially the case for Anecdote 2, which adapts Border 1. There’s a scene in the anime where Kusanagi realises someone is ghost-hacking and spying on her. She rushes out of her base and sees in the distance a parked car, which then leaves as she gives chase. As she’s then attacked by Hateful Purple Dreadlock Guy, we never find out who was in the car. The manga reveals this to have been Batou, and it makes perfect sense, given the manga’s extra context. We also spend a lot more time with Ishikawa and Borma. Along with Batou they make a fun trio who banter with each other incessantly, with Ishikawa exasperated how the other two seem to be squatting permanently in his home…
While Togusa also gets quite a few scenes to shine, Saito and Paz don’t get quite as much development, sadly. Batou’s personal life gets a lot of focus, as he even gets a very sweet girlfriend! However, we know that in later episodes and the concluding movie that he doesn’t have a relationship like that, so the whole time we’re waiting for the other shoe to drip and for something awful to happen. When it does, it’s still shocking, upsetting and horribly tragic. In terms of plotting, this is a far more standard manga than Shirow’s original. I had no difficulty in following the plot, and Fujisaku doesn’t namedrop random irrelevant characters or obscure technologies, nor does he get sidetracked by esoteric philosophical mind diarrhoea. It’s more of a blockbuster spy/police/action movie kind of story, but that’s fine. No-one else can be Shirow, not even Shirow himself these days.
The final section, Anecdote 6, surprisingly doesn’t adapt Fujisaku’s own Border 5: Pyrophoric Cult. It’s a completely different story, not shared with the anime. Batou and some of section 9 return to the former Kuzan/Qhardi civil war battlefield to prevent a reignition of the civil war. It maintains continuity and thematic consistency with the rest of Arise, as there’s a mind-controlling virus that causes sufferers to go nuts and kill people (though it’s not made clear if this is the Firestarter virus or not). The conclusion is suitably apocalyptic and probably would have made a better fifth anime episode than the one we got.
So while much of ~Sleepless Eye~ covers the same story as Arise Borders 1–4, there’s a completely new prologue and epilogue that together comprise about a third of the manga’s total length, plus the adapted sections have so many extra scenes that it’s extremely worthwhile to read, even for someone like me who has now watched the Arise anime several times over. I’d even suggest this manga is better than the anime that spawned it. It’s criminal that Kodansha have so completely flubbed the English release, locking it to a predatory gacha-like app that’s available only to readers in North America. It’s worth jumping through all the stupid hoops to seek this manga out.
There’s plenty more GitS manga to look at, so I’ll likely be back soon with an overview of Junichi Fujisaku’s other GitS manga, The Human Algorithm soon. After reading his treatment of Arise, I’m quite excited to read his other manga. Or maybe I’ll review his novels? Whatever I decide to do next, I’ll see you again soon!
Ghost in the Shell: Arise ~Sleepless Eye~
Writer: Junichi Fujisaku
Artist: Takumi Oyama
Volumes: 7
Chapters: 42 (digitally: 76)
JP Publisher: Kodansha (Monthly Young Magazine)
JP Publication date: 13th March 2013—20th June 2016
US Publisher: Kodansha (digital, via K Manga app)
US Publication date: 2024
