Author: Minekura KazuyaoImprint: Chara Comics Special
Publisher: Tokuma Shoten
ISBN4-19-960190-2
Author: Minekura Kazuyao
Imprint: Chara Comics Special
Publisher: Tokuma Shoten
ISBN4-19-960190-2
Reviewed by Jeanne
So here we have the further adventures of Kubota Makoto, one-time yakuza, nihilist manqué (fancy way of saying he tries to be but can't quite manage it) and ambivalent anti-hero. At the end of vol 1 Kubota stops his easy slide into nihilist hell by picking up a large cat in a back alley of Yokohama. Cat's name is Tokitoh Minoru. He can't remember anything of his past, and given the nightmares he has, one rather sees why. His right hand is furred and clawed, a sign that he's been exposed to the mystery drug Wild Adapter which does that to people. Take too much of it and all of you goes furry and fanged, after which your guts explode out of you and the bit of you that remains gets carted away on a stretcher by the police.
It's a year after vol 1. As Kubota's uncle, the cop Kasai says, Tokitoh was practically a wild animal when Kubota first found him. 
He's become semi-civilized in the time he's lived with Kubota, enough to be pissed off when Kubota comes home one night with a girl in tow. But it's not like that. Girl, Saori, is another half-wild stray getting near the end of her rope. Pregnant, with a boyfriend who's in the yakuza and also into drugs, she's running from just about everything. Boyfriend also takes WA, which brings the two rival gangs in Yokohama onto his trail and so onto his girlfriend's. Her path crosses Kubota and Tokitoh's again, and the police's, and the yakuza's including the unpleasant biseinen Sekiya. (Sekiya looks a lot like Stork from Stigma in his pre-amnesia assassin days. Sekiya might be Stork. Who knows?) Boss Sanada from Kubota's old yakuza group is still looking for him and finds him again as well. So at book's end our guys have two dangerous men from two opposing criminal outfits very much interested in both of them.
(Semi-spoilers below. Read at your own risk.)
Meanwhile we start getting hints as to why Kubota, who'd never been attached to anything, picked Tokitoh up in the first place and became as attached to him as he is. Unusually attached, even dependent, as Saori points out; and possibly not happy about it. The Kubota/ Tokitoh relationship isn't the easy feel-good parable it looks like-- guy who cares for nothing finds something to love and learns to be human. The theme of attachment/ obsession runs through Wild Adapter, and always carries a feeling of unease and danger with it. Everyone is oddly fascinated by Kubota, even the low-key black-market dealer and back-street doctor Koh of Chinatown. ('He shows up at my store by chance, as if he's calculated when I'll be at a loose end, just in order to entertain me a little.') They may care about him like his uncle Kasai or they may be repelled by him like Saori or they may simply be obsessed like the yakuza Sanada and Sekiya, but no-one can remain indifferent to him. Equally, Kasai and Sanada and Sekiya are all desperate to find the mystery drug, Wild Adapter. This may be just my imagination, but I see Minekura making an equation between longing/ obsession and the drug Wild Adapter itself. Both turn you into an animal of sorts and then kill you. Unattached Kubota in vol 1 is invincible, but also somehow lacking. As his uncle says, he's been looking all his life for something to get attached to. But when he does, the feeling is, he becomes vulnerable and possibly doomed.
I forget now who uttered these words of wisdom (I thought it was Sabina, but I can't find them on her wp) that should be engraved on everyone's heart because they are oh-so-true: "If there is an anime character called Joe, and if there is an episode where Joe dies, the episode will be called The Death of Joe. 
The Japanese do not consider this a spoiler." As anyone who follows WA knows, this series runs on doom-laden prophecies like a car runs on gas. We're told again and again that Kubota is waiting for the day of his death, and that the day of his death is coming. It's in the manga. "I saw a dead cat. He should have come to this world to scatter his guts. I would die this way." It's on all the goods. "I shall become your god. This is your heaven, so if you die, I will kill you." It's on the illustrations Minekura publishes monthly in Animage. "Tomorrow will come, without prayers. The end will come, without hurrying. I live only to be worthy of the corpse I shall leave behind on that day." (Those are all their translations, btw, not mine.)
The series begins to feel like an exercise in masochism at times. We're all sitting here waiting for the end to come. So it's a bit cheering to find Kubota's uncle saying at one point, 'When you meet enough criminals, you start being able to see what their futures will be. The ones who'll go on living their shitty little lives and the ones who'll pull themselves together, and the ones who won't be around long enough to do either. But I've never been able to tell with Makoto. Don't know what kind of life he'll have- don't even know if he'll live or die." (And that, FTR, is mine.) It kind of offsets the foreboding vision we're given of Kubota's death even as Kasai speaks. Well hey- if Kubota's doom was carved in stone his artist wouldn't have Kasai saying this in the first place, would she?