Rokuyoku

Honestly, this manga is so short it's hard to write a lot about it - but it uses its limited space to create a deliciously dark modern fairytale which doesn't pull punches. Be warned: this review will contain spoilers, though I think this story feels enough like an old legend that 'spoilers' are kind of irrelevant. The characters themselves don't really get that much space in Rokuyoku. The girls' friendship at the beginning is genuinely quite sweet, but the manga trips over itself to get to the nastiness. We see Yoshika plunge into an abyss of malevolent envy within the first few pages, but we don'treally see what's so special about the boy she supposedly loves enough to rip her best friendship apart. This may be deliberate: seeing Yoshika steal everything from Yukina, causing horrible injury and ultimately death, in a more developed context might make the whole thing a plodding, mean-spirited downward spiral. Instead, we get a vignette told with clinical efficiency and an odd, ambivalent curiosity about Yoshika's motives. It doesn't help that Yoshika is drawn in the same romantic, doll-like style as Yukina, meaning the weight and pain of her envy are felt far less by the reader. This doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it, though. It's not often that shoujo and schadenfreude (along the lines of the darkest Grimm stories) are found together. Other commenters say they wish it was longer; I don't agree. This would work superbly in an anthology of shorter horror works - anything longer would dull the eerie mood and overexplain its freaky final moments.