James Nicoll Reviews

2023’s Touring After the Apocalypse, Volume Four is the fourth tankōbon in Sakae Saito’s post-apocalyptic iyashikei manga. Touring has been serialized in in ASCII Media Works’ seinen manga magazine Dengeki Maoh since September 2020. Amanda Haley’s English translation was published in 2023.

The world may be in ruins, humanity may very nearly be a memory, but that isn’t going to stop exuberant Youko and stoic Airi from visiting Japan’s many wonders.

Well, the wonders that were not destroyed during the Whatever It Was, or submerged under rising seas¹.

True, many of the traditional routes across Japan are impassible. Coastal highways terminate in new bays. Bridges are missing spans. Mountain roads are severed by new gullies. All easily circumvented, given grit, ingenuity, and passionate embrace of the sunk cost fallacy.

Likewise, many of the attractions are not what they were before the Whatever It Was. Aquariums have leaked dry, many buildings are overgrown ruins, and as for Japan’s once-proud fleet of ferries…

Still, a person with sufficient determination and a vivid imagination can look at tumbled overpasses, gutted museums, and beached ships and see the world as it was before the Whatever It Was… as long as they pay enough attention to the world as it-actually-is not to drive off a new precipice or into the sea.

Airi’s senses are more than human. A sound audible to the cyborg (but not to human Youko) calls to Airi. The siren call leads the pair to the Yoshimi Hundred Caves. There, they discover their ruined world still holds novelties.

~oOo~

The roads are littered with abandoned vehicles. Why? Did they run out of fuel? Were the occupants killed by disease or radiation as they fled? Did the robot cars of tomorrow simply decide to stop conveying humans to-and-fro? There are no close-ups on the inside of the cars so the reader may never know.

Youko and Airi missed many wonderful attractions, because they didn’t set out until the world was smashed. What Youko and Airi encounter at the Yoshimi Hundred Caves isn’t new, exactly, but it is infrequent. Youko and Airi are literally the only terrestrials on the planet who will experience it. Best that they defer perishing from this era’s many dangers in order to preserve memories for as long as possible.

What they encounter provides contrast. From the cave phenomenon’s point of view, timing was bad as possible. First, it arrived before the party, and now it seems to have missed it entirely.

If there’s a moral to this volume, aside from ​“don’t drive off cliffs,” it is that timing is everything. Carpe diem, because the next apocalypse could be right around the corner.

Touring After the Apocalypse, Volume Four is available here (Yen Press), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: USA delenda est.