Look, I don’t know much about Japanese comic books except that for many Western young adults they’re a gateway drug to Japanophilia and the weeaboo life. As someone who spent a decade living in Tokyo, I find that sort of thing extremely distasteful. But over the years I’d heard enough about Kentaro Miura’s opus Berserk to expect something special. After hearing he’d worked himself to death in 2021, I added the manga to the to-read list.
I know that many fans of Berserk cite it as a monumental, life-changing read. But as I plodded my way through, I felt that many panels of the dense artwork were of questionable composition and often indecipherable. To my un-manga-fied sensibilities the overall story, particularly the later arc, was not as epiphany laden as the die-hard Miurites made it out to be. Not to tarnish the overall accomplishment—there are few, if any, comic book artists who have drawn and sold as much content as Miura did—Berserk simply didn’t strike me as a cohesive “masterpiece”.
It’s a shame that Miura didn’t get to finish the work, but I doubt he ever would have. The story was unraveling as it went, and not tightening to a foreseeable conclusion. And that’s fine: in fact, the final pages are even more poignant for being unfinished and the last thing that the original creator contributed to his magnificent story. But when taken against the backdrop of the other great works of literature that I’m consuming—Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo and Tolstoy’s War and Peace to name two—it’s hard for me not to feel as though my time would have been better spent with my nose in those books instead.
2024.08.07 – 2025.02.22