James Nicoll Reviews

Girls’ Last Tour, Volume 1, is the first instalment in Tsukumizu’s Girls’ Last Tour series.

Lost in a vast, empty, decaying city complex, Chito (the smart one) and Yuuri (the other one) wander in search of supplies. Failure may be inevitable; if so, their ultimate fate will be to starve. But at least they will starve together.

Starry Sky

Thanks to Yuuri’s bold suggestion to explore the ruins, the two girls search not just for food and fuel, but also a way out of the labyrinth. The key to escape may lie in Yuuri’s peculiar sleeping habits.

Comments

Presumably Chito likes her daffy pal (sister?) because otherwise Yuuri’s utility is unclear. Although her drool does have survival applications. 

War

Yuuri and Chito stumble across a munitions dump, which leads to a conversation about why the civilization in whose ruins the girls wander focused so much effort on bombs and guns at the expense of items of more use to the girls, like food. Later, Yuuri reveals that she absorbed the lessons of the discussion.

Comments

It’s hard to say which of the two girls will die last. Yuuri seems more likely to shoot and kill Chito, but also the one most likely to follow her curiosity to certain doom. Or, given that Yuuri made a point of stocking up on explosives, they might exit this sad world together.

Bath

Looking for shelter during a snow storm, the girls find something almost as good: the means to create an ad hoc hot tub.

Comments

Circumstances deny them the chance to bathe, for periods long enough that they don’t remember their last hot bath. The end of the world might sound like fun but mostly it seems to involve being hungry and stinky.

Journal

Sheltering from a blizzard, Yuuri finds an innovative fuel for the fire.

Comments

Yuuri, you illiterate barbarian. 

Laundry

Circumstances provide the girls with two unexpected luxuries: a chance to wash their clothes and an actual fish to eat. 

Comments

The apocalypse will be stinky. 

Some comments on this series imply the human race is doomed. The discussion of the dead fish, the first one the girls have ever seen, suggests that humanity was preceded in extinction by most of the biosphere. One hopes that the situation is only End Permian bad, in that a few populations of plants and animals still exist. They can repopulate the world in a hundred million years or so. So, only middling apocalypse. 

Encounter

The girls find their path blocked by a crevasse. They discover they are not alone when an ingenious traveller bridges the chasm by collapsing a building across the gap, very nearly smushing Chito and Yuuri in the process.

Comments

How common will explosives be after the end of the world? Apparently ​“very.”

Kanazawa is notably unrepentant about almost killing the two girls. Mind you, they don’t seem particularly upset at having almost been crushed under debris. 

City

A latter-day pundit, Kanazawa wanders the city, mapping it to fill the time. He and the girls discuss how to find meaningful occupation in the face of the apocalypse.

Comments

This episode also shows that the map maker is unfamiliar with the idea of tempting fate. He cannot guess that to express concern about a calamity might just be the way to invite it.

Lights

An attempt to gain a vantage point from which to admire the city facilitates a calamity that leaves Kanazawa questioning the purpose of his life.

General Comments

On the one hand, neither girl seems particular anxious about their circumstances, perhaps because this is the only life they’ve ever known. On the other hand, they are quite aware that death, sudden or lingering, is always an option. There is an ongoing low-key tension humming in these quiet little stories. It’s not as tranquil a story as YKK, not at all. 

But it is mind-popcorn, so I will no doubt be reading the later volumes.

Girls’ Last Tour, Volume 1 is available here (Amazon) and here (Chapters-Indigo).