Genre: Science Fiction
Age rating: 16+
Price: $10.95

These are the shards of my consciousness. Once more it will be one again, and a new persona awaken. But no one knows of my existence. I am nameless.

There is a young man who calls himself ES, for want of a better name. He has no family, no friends, no job; he wanders the streets of Tokyo and takes whatever he wants, be it a hotel room, a new jacket, or the identity of somone else's best friend. For ES has a unique gift: he can "hack" into other people's brains and read or alter their thoughts. Detached from society and almost entirely free of emotion, ES intervenes in people's lives from time to time, but more out of curiosity than out of malice or good will.

ES is a science fiction series of unusual intelligence and imagination. Soryo avoids the typical cliches of the ESPer story, opting instead to depict the surreal and often horrific mindscapes of the people whose brains ES "hacks". These wordless sequences are thrilling and unsettling -- not quite nasty enough to tip the series all the way over into horror, but certainly enough to make it easy to understand why ES holds himself so aloof from most people; if he's exposed all the time to the horrors they carry around in their subconscious minds, it's no wonder he prefers to keep his distance.

Perhaps to temper the coldness of the title character, Soryo introduces a second protagonist in the second chapter: a neurologist called Mine Kujyou who is called in to investigate the bizarre effects of ES's "hacking". Kujyou is herself a little odd, being so wrapped up in her work that the numerous omiai meetings she goes to always end in disaster. Naturally, she is fascinated by ES, all the more so when she proves to be immune to his "hacking". At the end of this first volume, Kujyou learns a little about ES's past and his true nature, although many questions remain unanswered -- perhaps most importantly: what is he going to do next?

Unfortunately, the chapters dealing with Kujyou reveal a deficiency in Soryo's art: she doesn't have much of a facility with facial expressions, which makes some of the conversation scenes and many of the reaction shots a great deal limper than they should have been. It's a relatively minor problem, but it does detract from my enjoyment of those scenes when I have to think carefully to figure out how the characters are supposed to be reacting. Soryo seems to be much more at ease with the bizarre and often gory images in the characters' subconscious minds than with their changing faces.

All in all, though, ES is a little gem: clever, unexpected, and imaginative.


 

 

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