I spent a large chunk of time this weekend binging １４歳 and well, I finished it!
Wowee, it sure is… something! Definitely the weirdest manga I’ve read so far (Jojo’s for example is much more straightforward).
For my own sake, I feel like I have to try to recap the plot, so here’s a (spoiler tagged) attempt at a 5 sentence summary:
'5 Sentence' Summary of the plot of 14
About 100 years in the future, a 14 year-old girl consults a psychic about an unplanned pregnancy, at which point the psychic vomits a ghost which intones the ambiguous yet ominous phrase: “14歳で終わる.”
Meanwhile, in the colossal black obsidian pyramid which dwarfs the Tokyo Dome and houses a major artificial chicken production company, a scientist notices an eyeball has formed in one of the vats of chicken goop, and this eyeball swiftly forms into a humanoid with the head of a chicken, who escapes and becomes the Cambridge-educated Dr. Chicken George, a reclusive yet brilliant scientist, who bears a vengeful grudge against humanity on behalf of animals and plots to escape earth on a rocket as ominous omens foretelling earth’s destruction are beginning to accumulate, one of which being that around the world children are being born with green hair and subsequently facing prejudice (including the President of the United State’s newborn son, America); to face this calamity, The President seeks out and spars with Dr. Chicken George on his trash island in the middle of the ocean before the latter escapes on a helicopter.
Also interested in utilizing Chicken George’s vast intellect is Grandmaster Rose, a capitalist oligarch who seeks immortality, which only Chicken George can solve the secrets of, so an elaborate television production is produced with the twin goals of being so captivating that it distracts the populace from the mounting environmental catastrophes (namely, all plants on earth have now withered and died), and to infatuate Chicken George with Barbara, the star of the show who is an agent trained to be able to fall in love with anyone - this works and Chicken George is turned towards humanity’s side for the sake of Barbara, however he sees it coming and takes a drug to undo his scientific abilities beforehand, and the quest for an immortality drug ends up leading to a lot of body horror, but does produce commercialized human clones referred to as もの.
The world is definitely going to end, so the leaders of the world’s nations send a message to space asking for help from aliens, who do respond but it goes very badly for the humans, and so the only remaining hope for humanity’s existence whatsoever is a group of three-year-old kids who are selected because of their great luck to ride a spaceship constructed by Chicken George to be sent into space so humanity can live on and look for a new home; one of these children is the President of the United States’ son, who dies in a helicopter accident because of a centipede, but is resurrected in a strange way via Chicken George’s DNA centrifuge because it turns out America and the child from the prologue (you know, the unexpected pregnancy), Kiyora, share exactly the same genetic composition, just rearranged, and Kiyora has “one additional cell,” so they stick Kiyora in the centrifuge and rearrange him into America, and give the additional cell leftover to Kiyora’s mother.
Kiyora/America and the other lucky kids (who are all three year olds at this point) eventually do manage to blast off into space, on Chicken George’s personal spaceship (which is shaped like a Tyrannosaurus Rex), and they face a lot of additional hardships, including a ghost version (??) of Chicken George, and Grandmaster Rose in a child clone body, before the book time skips to the critical date when these kids will turn 14 and it’s really all supposed to be over, by which point sentient talking cockroaches are about all that is remaining on Earth, and kids are starting to turn into T-Rexes as they turn 14, but they manage to escape the bounds of space somehow, discovering that what we think of as space is actually a caterpillar in another world, much like our own, except everyone is chicken people like Chicken George, so they make sure the caterpillar is doing okay and isn’t run over or anything, and then they jump back into the caterpillar and ambiguously return to Earth or our universe in some form or another, while Chicken George('s ghost?) remains in the overworld.
Five normal sentences!
It leaves out things like a T-Rex in a suitcase, a cactus person foretelling earth’s doom, Chicken Lucy, the weirdly villainous Vice President of the United States, how the kids can turn invisible via ninjutsu, the fact that when the extremely Giger-y aliens show up in a colossal cross-shaped spaceship, the plot to draw ratings via discovering a forged mummy of Jesus, the secret “in case of emergency” clause left behind by America’s Founding Fathers that’s just “if the worst happens, be sure to only save the white people”, the genetically modified monsters and parasites, and the relevation that according to Chicken George, humanity was not in fact descended from mammals, but from T-Rexes (there’s really a lot of T-Rex imagery in this book). Probably more things I’m forgetting besides.
Is it good? Well… Yeah, I think mostly!
Further discussion
The edition I’m reading is really gorgeous, and on some level a great presentation of something extremely weird is all I’m really ever asking for, but even besides that I think the book mostly (mostly!!) feels like the good, endearing kind of weird ambitious shlock, rather than the mean kind.
Thematically, I think it generally works in a surprisingly relevant way as being a story about humanity trying (and generally failing) to cope with impending climate catastrophe (破滅 is a key word) - the main meaning for “14” in the title is a metaphor for humanity – that humanity will manage just enough self-sustained complexity to self-destruct before ever reaching collective maturity. Which sounds really cynical! And I guess it is… but maybe it’s because the story is told in such an anything-goes sort of way world-building wise, but it comes across as still kind of sincerely hopeful to me somehow. Like we’ll probably all die in a climate catastrophe, but at least the flare out will be weird and sort of beautiful, and something will go on, somehow…
Tonally, Umezu’s characters are always so consistently straight-faced and direct, that it feels like an intricate box full of clockwork people reacting to things, more than it does like, a deep character study. Which on the one hand makes it even harder to stay grounded in the story, but on the other, helps with the feeling of it being a spectacle flashing by. Like – I’d prefer that over something that goes really hard into angsty characterization or real-world politics and drops the ball completely, if that makes sense.
Umezu’s art style is still an acquired taste, but I thought there were sections in here (particularly when the crucifix Giger aliens show up, or when the immortality treatment goes real bad) that are genuinely awe-inspiring.
Also did I mention the spaceship shaped like a T-Rex?
That said, there are parts I’m not into… the last volume explores a lot of the same ground as The Drifting Classroom (Umezu mentions in the interview at the back of the book that he conceived the series largely as a continuation thematically of that series, so it’s good I finished reading it first), but with even younger kids, which makes all the horrible things that happen extra unpleasant. You need a pretty strong stomach for body horror, gross stuff in general, and very bad things happening to people including small children if you read this.
Also, the most outright evil person in the book is pretty heavily queer/trans-coded, albeit in that Sci-fi body-swapping, cloning, “what even is an individual anymore” sort of way. Still, not my favorite…
I didn’t look up that many words, so it would be a relatively quick read, except that there tends to be a lot of bizarre exposition and paneling like this:
It’s definitely kind of exhausting to read in long stretches, but overall I think it’s a hoot, and I’m definitely glad to know it exists and what it’s deal is.
I would recommend reading The Drifting Classroom first, and if you like that, and want that but with a far larger and weirder scale, check this out.
This is one where I couldn’t help but take some pictures as I read, presented without comment:
Pictures of 14
While the doorstopper editions of this were extremely cool, I’m very much looking forward to reading manga with sensible volume demarcations again.
I pick what to read next with an element of randomness, and since I’ve enjoyed reading ハルタ so much, I put pretty much every series I’ve come across in that magazine into the queues I draw from in one form or another, so what happened to come up was 煙と蜜, which is the series with the lovely historical fiction Taisho-era setting, and the uncomfortable premise: a 30-year-old betrothed to a 12-year-old girl… (and not necessarily in a “oh no this is awful and she needs to escape” way)
I expect to continue to have very mixed feelings about it! But at least this way they’ll be informed by the whole series, and not just starting in the middle, and if it does turn out to be 100% handled well somehow that would of course be nice.
It’s only a couple of volumes before where I’m already reading in magazine-form, so it should go quite quickly indeed, either way.
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Genre tags: Drama, Josei, Mystery; category tags: 21st Century, Award-Nominated Work, Clever Protagonist, Crime/s, Detective/s, Episodic, Expressionless Protagonist, Female Demographic with Male Lead, Japan, Perceptive Male Lead. (In copying those over from mangaupdates because I’m bad at summaries, I see the episodic tag, which worries me a little, since episodic stuff is generally not my thing. On the other hand, Tamura Yumi… yes. Should be okay!)
