James Nicoll Reviews

Insomniacs After School, Volume 8 is the eighth tankōbon in Makoto Ojiro’s contemporary manga series. Serialized in Shogakukan’s seinen manga magazine Weekly Big Comic Spirits, Insomniacs After School has been ongoing since May 2019. The English translation of Volume 8 was released in 2024.

Grumpy insomniac Ganta Nakami and ebullient insomniac Isaki Magari bonded over their discovery that the only place either can sleep is their school’s observatory. Various consequences followed: to keep using the observatory, the pair had to restart the astronomy club. More significantly for Ganta and Isaki, they eventually realized that they were a couple.

Ganta cannot sleep because he fears what the next day will bring. It may be ominous that Volume 8 begins with a discussion of Isaki’s health.

Born with one heart valve, Isaki has had three operations. Her rehabilitation and treatment are ongoing. She attends monthly check-ups. While her condition has improved greatly — doctors no longer predict she has just two months to live — the operations left her scarred. She is very aware of her mortality. Perhaps she will have a normal lifespan; perhaps she will die tomorrow.

Until that time, Isaki is determined to live life to the fullest. Therefore, she finally brings herself to have a long delayed and awkward conversation with her mother, asking for permission to formally join the astronomy club¹. Isaki is allowed to join.

The club is recognized by the school student council and is given an actual budget. Now it the club must continue to justify its existence with continued activities. After consulting their mentor (Yui Shiromaru, former student and at one time the sole member of the club), the pair decide to spend a night in the observatory making observations. Their teacher-supervisor Yui Shiromaru tags along, to ensure that the heavenly bodies observed are stellar, not each other’s.

Alas, the weather once again refuses to cooperate. Not only are the skies overcast, the students and their teacher find themselves overnighting in school during a typhoon. Just how sturdy is the observatory?

~oOo~

I wanted to start the year with a manga in which nothing bad is likely to happen. Some readers may be concerned that a manga in which one of whose protagonists may drop dead at any moment and another who is convinced life brings only disaster and sorrow, a manga featuring a potentially building-leveling storm, might not fit the bill. I can reassure them that nothing bad happens in this volume.

In online discussion of this manga posters express considerable anxiety over Isaki’s fate. After all, that venerable trope, Chekov’s Gun, suggests that the author would not mention Isaki’s health if it were not going to be plot-relevant. Such readers should remember that her health is already plot-relevant². Also, Isaki (and Ganta as well) will certainly die, as they are mere humans, so the only question is when.

I can also point out that Isaki is only a manga character. Even if she does die at some point, she will still be alive in the earlier chapters. 

There is one minor setback not mentioned above. In this volume the pair set out to tidy the observatory, only to make it messier. I think we’ve all been there.

This manga gives readers a lot of astronomical information, some of which was actually new to me. Red supergiant Mu Cephei is also known as the Garnet Star! I did not know that.

Not much happens in this volume, but as nothing in particular is supposed to happen, that’s just fine. As with the previous volumes, the author delivers exactly what she set out to deliver: luscious art and progressive character development. No doubt the same will be true of future volumes as well.

Insomniacs After School, Volume 8 is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Membership in the astronomy club will bring Isaki into routine contact with Ganta, about whom her parents have certain suspicions (thanks to the unsanctioned, unchaperoned holiday the two took in a previous volume).

2: Ganta and Isaki being the terribly responsible teens that they are, the odds are that even if she were perfectly healthy, she and Ganta might have only just progressed to handholding and rare kisses. As it is, it’s clear that she’s very self-conscious about her scars and isn’t keen on showing them to anyone. In fact, it’s a big step in this volume that she describes them to Ganta.

In fact, the pair don’t seem to be unusual in their deliberately paced romance. Secondary couple Nono and Ukegawa have after eight volumes advanced to polite private conversation while Nono sketches Ukegawa. As noted in previous reviews, this is entirely contrary to what the adults assume that teenagers get up to when not closely monitored.