Manga Review: Spirit Photographer Saburo Kono

Written and published in 2020, the creators behind The Promised Neverland are back again with yet another one-shot. I wrote a previous article about DC3—another one-shot manga by writer Kaiu Shirai and art by Posuka Demizi—and I think I may even prefer this one shot over that last one.

The manga opens on some panels of a young boy named Sota who is clearly playing on a Nintendo Switch, possibly getting in a round of Fortnite. His mom indicates that he's been missing quite a bit of school. That's when he gets a knock at the door from his new next door neighbor—the titular character of Saburo Kono. Saburo is a bit eccentric and even seems kinda frightening in a way. His face is in something of a permanent Joker smile, with puffy ringed hair spilling out from underneath a wide-brimmed hat. He tells the boy he's a photographer, and while he claims he's a photographer of the "normal" variety, he tells Sota that he's been trying to take a picture of the spirit of a ghost haunting the apartment he's just moved into but has not yet managed to do it successfully.

It has been rumored for a while that a ghost has been living in that apartment. Many other people have moved in before Saburo did, and they all moved out just as quickly, terrified of the ghost. Supposedly, the woman who once lived there died of suspected suicide, having fallen from her balcony to the ground below.

When Saburo invites Sota to his apartment to try to coax out the ghost, it turns out the truth is that Saburo has already seen the ghost, and that she had been asking to see Sota by name. It's definitely the ghost of the woman who died, but now looks scary and ghoulish. Sota is terrified, but not just because he's seeing a ghost. The kid is not having to face reality that maybe it's his fault that the woman died in the first place.

Sota recalls the neighboring woman treating him kindly after seeing he'd been bullied at school. She did everything she could to help him. And on the night of her death, the reality is that she shouldn't have died, because it was actually Sota who was the one trying to commit suicide. The only reason the woman died was because she had climbed out onto her balcony in an attempt to rescue him, and in the process she slipped, fell, and died. The whole thing was an accident. To make it worse, Sota never told anyone he was the reason she died, and has been sitting with that guilt ever since.

But just as Sota is recalling this story, the ghost of the woman begins to speak to him, telling him that she's just glad that he's okay, and she's never been mad at him. They're able to mend their relationship, and she's able to ease his troubled mind. In the end, the photographer Saburo is able to take a sentimental photo of the woman's ghost with Sota, then destroy the photograph and release her soul to the afterlife. And when all is said and done, Saburo leaves to go off on some new ghost photography adventure.

This story feels like it could be just the first of many adventures for Saburo. The boy Sota is a good character for the sake of this one chapter, but doesn't seem like someone who would necessarily be fully fleshed out later, had Shonen Jump decided to continue the story past this one-shot. This feels like one of those stories where we follow the one singular main character on many adventures through many places and meeting lots of new people with their own ghost problems. And it's interesting, because Saburo is not the kind of conventionally attractive character you would expect to be the lead of a hit shonen titles. He's not young, he dresses oddly, his face and hair are a little creepy, and his manner of speaking is also kinda discomforting. Perhaps that's the reason why this story works better as a one-shot than it does as a full run story. I imagine the demeanor of the lead character is not particularly marketable. But for that reason, I might have liked seeing him get a little bit more time and see what other kinds of misadventures he could get up to.

Spirit Photographer Saburo Kono is the last of the one-shots available on the Shonen Jump app and Viz web site created by the Promised Neverland creative team, and although there are other one-shot manga they've worked on together, it's leading me to hope they land on something that they can continue on into another full-fledged successful series. They're clearly something special together, and I'll be looking forward to whatever they work on next.

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