Drifting Net Café - Shūzō Oshimi
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| Image generated by AI |
Kōichi Toki is an ordinary office worker. Married, a father, stuck in routine. One evening, he walks into a cybercafé. Inside, he runs into Mari, a classmate from his past. Outside, nothing remains. The world has vanished. The café is uprooted—isolated in some unknown space. No exits. No signal. No laws. Only people left alone with themselves—and their regrets.
This manga twists the survival genre. It’s not about building a new society, but watching its immediate collapse. The characters have no time to adapt. They regress. Social masks drop quickly: beneath them lie violence, desire, and fear. No heroes. No clear paths. Just pressure that erupts the moment rules vanish.
The heart of the story isn’t physical survival—it’s the mental spiral. Kōichi, caught between frustration and fantasy, is forced to face an alternate life—with Mari. But that youthful dream quickly becomes a trap, and the manga questions what we do with memory when the present collapses. Adultery, jealousy, possession—all distorted by isolation and urgency.
Oshimi’s art, less polished than in his later works, leans on body tension, skewed glances, faces frozen in fear or lust. It’s more raw than subtle, but never gratuitous. The manga tries to capture what happens to people when norms fall away—without preaching, without judging. The cybercafé becomes a reverse mirror of society—an exposed space where everything we hide becomes visible, raw, unmanageable.