Two teenage boys, Sei Inaba and Tsuyoshi Oishi, fall in love with a girl named Yuko.
Yuko is seriously ill and needs a transplant. Inaba's dream is to become a chemical engineer, to construct an artificial heart to replace Yuko's failing human heart. Oishi, from a working class background and with an abusive alcoholic father, dreams of going to night school to study science so that he too can help Yuko. Although she flirts with both boys, Yuko finally chooses Inaba over Oishi.
Yuko is put on a respirator, and it's left to Inaba to authorize turning off the respirator when it appears that Yuko is brain dead. Yuko had told him that she didn't want to be kept alive artificially. But at the funeral, Oishi angrily confronts Inaba, telling him that Yuko had told him she was afraid to die.
Fifteen years pass. Inaba is now a professor of chemical engineering working on his artificial heart research, while Oishi struggles as a post-doctorate student in a medical research lab at the same university. The two young men now compete for funding for their studies, and are still bitterly at odds over Yuko and what her final wishes were.
In the meantime, down a hallway, lies a secret room where a female patient has lain in a vegetative state for 15 years, kept alive by long-term beta blockers until science finds a way to repair her over-extended cardiac muscles...
Breathe Deeply, by husband and wife mangaka team Doton Yamaaki, is an ambitious effort that bogs down in too many science discussions and too little emotional investment in the characters. The story attempts to debate the ethics of transplants, organ donation and stem cell research, but a confusing narrative and lack of any character to positively identify with makes for tough going for the reader.
In my view, if a story is dark and all or most of the characters are negative, something else about the story has to hold my attention because I'm not likely to finish it otherwise. A story like Death Note easily kept me watching for one simple reason: I wanted to know what would happen next. It was the suspense of watching Light make his moves, triumph, fail and almost get caught, etc., that held me in thrall all the way to the very end.
Here, Inaba and Oishi turn twisted and bitter as adults, and are surrounded by bosses and co-workers who are even more manipulative and destructive than they are. An endless round of scenes where the worst of human nature is played out leaves me drained, not entertained - and I learn nothing by it.
Breathe Deeply veers unevenly between medical thriller, fragile love story and horror, and at a massive 468 pages seems destined to be picked up only by hardcore North American manga fans.
One Peace Books, whose motto is "One World, One Love, One Peace," is a small NY publishing house started in 2006 by Ayumu Takahashi. Judging from their book catalog, which contains an eclectic mix of manga, fiction and non-fiction - all licensed works from Japan and translated into English - One Peace looks like a smaller version of Vertical, Inc.
In this economy, and given what has been happening recently in our industry, one hopes that One Peace will consider licensing works that are a bit more accessible to American readers.
FTC disclaimer: I received a free copy of Breathe Deeply for review purposes.
