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バルバラ異界
24
4
Finished
Jul 27, 2002 to Jun 28, 2005
10.0/10
Average Review Score
100%
Recommend It
1
Reviews Worldwide
I feel so many emotions. Moto Hagio has quickly become one of my favorite authors overall, not just manga, and I feel like she is one of the best narrative authors out there in the world. The way she introduce plot elements - so slowly, so subtly, one by one, it leaves you wondering what story you are really reading. Barbara is a story about families, at its core, about individuality, identity and who people really are. I am shocked by the ending, I feel like Moto Hagio appeared to me to ask for a wish and I said "Please, let the characters be happy, please saveeveryone", and she did it, and then when I started crying because I read the ending she said "You should have been careful what you wished for." Barbara is about a mysterious island. It appeared in the sea of Japan, out of nowhere, but it also exists in the dreams of a Aoba, a girl who has been in a coma since the brutal murder of her parents. The story is set in a strange futuristic world where supernatural events are considered commonly scientific events and the protagonist, Watarai, is a scholar of dreams and someone who can enter people's dreams. The plot has multiple lines: the mysteries of the planet Mars, the relationship between Aoba and her family, between Watarai and his son, the horror elements of individualism, discrimination, human experiments - it is impossible to describe without spoilers. It just left me sobbing like a child.
At the center of story is a teenaged girl who has been in a coma since the age of nine, when she was found with her dead parents. The mother had apparently killed the father, and then killed herself. And the girl, Aoba, was found to have her dead parents' hearts in her stomach. The core mystery, of course, is why this girl ate her parents' hearts, but there are plenty of other mysteries to chew on. Why does the presumably imaginary dreamworld—Barbara—that Aoba now inhabits seem to affect the real world, and what is her connection to the boy, Kiriya, who she has never met and who shares her dreams of Barbara? And what does this have to do with a mysterious scientist looking for the secret to eternal youth, or, for that matter, with a long extinct race of Martians? (Source: MU)