Fuck this. Fuck this so hard. Emerging is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read. It’s a rollercoaster ride of Social Darwinism, a comedy of errors, and a braindead thriller. I got so annoyed while reading this at times that I felt like I was going to end up in the hospital, myself. I’ll give credit to its concept: Emerging is about an (attempted) plausible scenario in which a new super virus surfaces in Japan.

The two-volume manga documents what it believes would most likely happen from the moment the first victim exhibits his symptoms to the conclusion, and all the escalating public and political tension between. It’s subject matter that you don’t typically see in manga, and it never sacrifices its original goals by introducing supernatural elements or something. It’s a thriller that finds suspense in the absurdity of nature and society.

Something simple on paper, yet we see very little of despite its effectiveness in how easy it should be to relate to and be interested in the premise. Aren’t you curious about what would happen in the event of a seemingly unstoppable killer virus? It’s entirely possible in reality. Hopefully we would fare better than these absolute stooges, however. Brace yourself for spoilers, because I don’t care about ruining this manga for anyone.

The core of why I hated this manga so much lies in its protagonist, Dr. Onotera. Onotera is, as his title suggests, a doctor. He’s also, as his actions do not suggest, experienced and considered by his peers to be a prodigy in health care. This legend of the operating room shows none of the expertise you would imagine from the immense amount of studying, experience, and competency required to become a doctor to a downright embarrassing contrast.

When our new virus is first discovered, it’s immediately known to be lethal. The virus exhibits symptoms akin to an extreme version of Ebola. Ebola, already one of the deadliest diseases anyone can contract, is known for causing bleeding from nearly any orifice. The new virus does the same and eventually leads to the victim swelling and then exploding into a shower of blood. Again, this happens to the first victim. Our fictional doctors already know the disease has severe symptoms resulting in death.

Onotera, while trying to suppress the symptoms of a victim taken into the operating room, almost immediately breaks down with a panic attack as if he were an intern observing a surgery for the first time in his entire life. Onotera’s childish outburst and bumbling causes him to distract the other doctors from helping the patient, and he even rips a hole in his sanitation suit, thus opening him to infection of a virus with an unknown method of spreading.

Onotera’s completely unacceptable incompetency endangers the patients and all other doctors in the operating room. Even though one of the most critical traits of any doctor, especially one supposed to have experience, is the ability to handle oneself under extreme amounts of pressure is lacking in Onotera, no one seems to really care. Instead of having his job threatened, the “genius” Onotera only gets a light scolding and whimpers a bit about how pathetic he is on his own.

Our main character is immediately proven to be an absolute moron with no self-control and no skills befitting a doctor. Already, a mountain of plausibility has crumbled, and it’s only getting worse from here. Somehow the story thinks it can just tell us Onotera is a great doctor and then have him behave in a way you wouldn’t even expect a “bad” doctor to act, making it that much more difficult to believe in this story. It’s so insulting to the reader’s intelligence and I would be appalled if the author thought he wrote a believable character and had taken a single health class in his entire life.

So, super doctor Onotera has already opened up the possibility for an extremely deadly virus to spread further. By some absolute miracle he escapes infection despite deserving it more than nearly anyone in the story. The pursuit to stop the virus becomes personal when his neighbor’s daughter, a girl he tutors (poor girl), becomes infected after being exposed to the first victim’s combustion at a crosswalk.

This brings us to our second stooge. Akari’s a typical high school girl walking home joyously after meeting with her boyfriend, Ooshima, a lug of a young man who’s size and shyness contrasts greatly with Akari. While Akari is out on the street, she notices the first infected. She thinks to herself that the man is unusually swollen, has bloodshot eyes, and is clearly coughing a lot. After the man explodes and showers her with blood, Akari shrugs it off in stride and keeps marching on home, apparently thinking that the guy just exploded for no reason, since she has no interest in going to a hospital (an obvious result of Onotera’s tutoring).

The next day, Akari has the same symptoms as the exploding man she witnessed. Looking into a mirror, she even has bloodshot eyes. For a moment, Akari thinks that just maybe she should stay home that day. But you know how teenagers are, deadly viruses are nothing in the face of love and Akari would hate to miss a chance to see Ooshima. Akari decides to try and kill her entire school, but is tragically cut short by the severity of her symptoms and trapped in an infirmary.

Ooshima, thinking the virus is something mild like a cold, tells Akari that he doesn’t care if he gets sick and just wants to kiss her. It’s very stupid, sure, but something I can buy horny high school students doing. Not to mention, Ooshima isn’t the one who saw this virus cause a man to explode into a blood fountain. I mean, sure, the virus still causes incredible weakness, gives you the unusual symptom of bloodshot eyes, and other symptoms, but… Fuck it, Ooshima will get his dues later.

Akari is finally confined to her home to rest and recuperate. No, not a hospital for some reason. If it were America’s health care system, I could understand the decision. A light bulb goes off in Onotera’s head when his best friend and fellow doctor, Sekiguchi, tells him that the witnesses to the first victim may catch the virus. This mind-blowing revelation about how viruses spread makes Onotera realizes Akari is at risk, and now the war on the virus has become personal.

Onotera proves his years of experience and brilliant intellect yet again by abandoning his job and driving straight to Akari’s house. Instead of saving precious time and calling the family to tell them to take her to the hospital, I might add. Onotera also doesn’t call an ambulance the moment he opens the door and sees Akari’s mother, also sick, literally crawling on the floor.

Since it’s not hard to believe Onotera was asleep in class the day they talked about quarantining people with dangerous diseases (which was probably week 2 of an Intro to Med class), he rushes in by himself completely unprotected and runs straight into Akari’s room to confirm she’s brutally ill. This is something literal children know not to do.

Again, by the grace of God, Onotera escapes infection. You think a rip in his sanitation suit will stop him? He’ll show you by not catching it with normal clothing. So now that Onotera confirms Akari is sick, something he could’ve easily done by picking up a fucking phone instead of risking his life and countless others, she’s finally taken to the hospital to maybe not die a horrible death.

It’s clear the author wanted Onotera to work as an audience surrogate that’s constantly clueless and asking medical questions that can be exposited by the supporting cast, but you have to make that a natural character trait. It’s not remotely believable that someone as stupid and lacking in basic medical knowledge as Onotera could be a doctor. He fails as both a well-rounded character and as a surrogate, because he was made both too stupid to relate to, as well as the fact that he’s a doctor being a position most common people can’t imagine themselves in to begin with.

There is almost no reason in this story why Onotera had to be a doctor. Everything about his character could remain completely the same and improve his character drastically as well as the story’s credibility by simply making him something like an intern. Other characters still offer the perspective of an actual doctor you need to explain the story, but Onotera isn’t irredeemably negligent. He could’ve maintained an unusually close relationship to the doctors for an intern by simply having Sekiguchi be a long-time older friend who graduated before him. Instead we’re treated to a dangerous dunce who almost destroys the story on his own.

But he’s not alone! Akari gave Onotera some camaraderie in idiocy, but was too excusable on account of being a teenager. Fortunately, we have another shameful professional in the form of Mori. Mori is a researcher on viruses, and obsessive at that. Her passion and curiosity for biology is clear to everyone and she’s regarded as a virus fanatic, particularly being interested in studying Ebola.

However, the author goes way, way too far with this quirk of Mori and turns her into a monster. Mori has a sociopathic desire to advance her career by studying more dangerous viruses at the cost of lives. As it’s revealed throughout the story that the virus continues to have more dangerous properties than initially realized, Mori repeatedly responds with an explosive glee. The virus might be airborne? Oh, wonderful! Maybe it’ll kill enough people so Mori can get permission to examine the virus with more sophisticated equipment.

This character trait is supposed to be endearingly awkward and cute, but to any sane person, it’s pushed to a degree that makes her seem psychotic and unsympathetic. The rest of the cast responds to this by merely laughing and shrugging, never reprimanding her for her horrendous behavior. Mori goes unchallenged the entire story and never grows. By the end, she gets the promotion she’s looking for even though she seems like she’d be willing to poison the nation’s water supply if it meant she got more research subjects.

Hey, at least she’s got some knowledge of medicine. Onotera is down in the dumps after realizing his stupidity may have gotten him infected with Ebola, but Mori is able to confirm the virus isn’t Ebola but instead is something not in any virus database. When hearing this news, Onotera is so relieved that he sighs and falls over on his back. The virus may be way more harmful than Ebola and is known to cause people to suffer in agony before exploding into gore, but thank god it’s not Ebola!

Sekiguchi, noticing Onotera is weirdly happy about being at risk for a disease far more dangerous than Ebola, has to explain to Onotera the extremely basic concept of why a virus being completely undiscovered is bad (because there’s no basis on how to treat it). Onotera’s reckless actions that endanger the nation about cease at this point in the story, but he’s never not used as the story’s idiot who needs everything explained to him. Onotera’s foolishness (I’m running out of synonyms) mostly results in him asking stupid questions or being shocked when Sekiguchi explains basic things to him like the possibility of the virus spreading by air when we already should know that’s possible due to it being a new virus.

This is a decent time to give Sekiguchi a more thorough introduction, but the simplest way to describe him is as everything Onotera isn’t. By some miracle, the author shows he has some ability to make a character that behaves like an actual doctor, which makes the rest of the cast all the more puzzling. Sekiguchi takes the initiative on discovering the virus, cataloging it, tracking its infection, and considering the implications of the virus’s routes of travel and how the public and government respond to the virus.

It’s absolutely night and day with these two, and yet Onotera is our savior because the story tells us he is. In fact, at one point Sekiguchi himself says that Onotera is a “born doctor, unlike [him],” which is a statement so powerful in its analytical failure that I had to take a break from reading. Oh, Sekiguchi, your ego has been utterly demolished by your absurd fictional universe. You’ll never get the recognition you deserve.

Other than its utterly insane characters, Emerging‘s plot follows a pretty sensible path. The story addresses how public panic factors into the hospital having to deal with the infected, and it also shines a light on political negligence with the higher-ups in Japan keeping the virus’s danger secret. It’s believable that a nation might sacrifice the safety of its people to keep its economy moving smoothly, and it’s nice to see that lucidity in a story that otherwise has a fever higher than any Ebola victim.

There are some transparent jabs Japan’s society and infrastructure as a result. At one point a character angrily tells Onotera (the audience) that we’re facing this deadly virus as a result of people not using antibiotics properly and the like. While not necessarily true, it’s certainly a problem, but this genuine message can’t help but be hilariously undermined by the fact that we’ve seen our characters make countless stupid actions that risk spreading the virus. Our doctors are putting themselves right in front of the disease unprotected and we’re supposed to believe antibiotic overuse is the problem? Hoo, boy.

Any accurate depictions or criticisms of people in the face of this disease are invalidated by countless hypocrisies elsewhere. There’s a part where a character criticizes the news for trying to get people in a panic by fear-mongering their way to views, despite that seemingly being the entire objective of this manga. Frankly, the news is probably more trustworthy—and what a horrifying thing to say.

Ooshimi is reasonably worried about his girlfriend, Akari, but can’t get past the quarantine barricade to see her. As we learned earlier, Ooshimi isn’t the brightest child and decides to pose as a doctor to get into the room where Akari is. Ooshimi removes his mask and kisses Akari on her respirator. To be fair, it’s probably safer than what he did earlier. The hospital staff justifiably freak out at seeing a crazy teenager has broken into a hospital’s quarantined room and restrain Ooshimi.

Instead of Ooshimi going to jail and receiving psychiatric treatment like he probably should be, he is merely detained in the room he’s caught in. Ooshimi says that if Akari is going to die then he wants to die with her. An observing doctor, an adult mind you, says they can “understand his feelings.” Nobody thinks Ooshimi acted like a moron, and he’s not punished for his actions, similar to every other character in the story.

In fact, he’s rewarded by becoming the fucking savior of Japan. It turns out Ooshimi is already infected despite exhibiting no symptoms. The first part isn’t a shock, but the latter suggests Ooshimi has antibodies that can be replicated in order to create a serum that can stop the virus. I don’t know why no one checked Onotera’s blood for immunity after he practically bathed in the virus and didn’t receive it, but the government approves the use of a cordoned-off research facility meant for the deadliest viruses instead of sending samples to the USA.

A serum is successfully created and everyone is cured. Hooray. Somehow the death toll of this entire incident caps at 10, and with no display of how much time has passed, this whole ordeal seemed to happen over the course of a few days despite the virus being said to lay dormant for weeks. Onotera is a naive moron and naturally thinks everything’s good to go, but Sekiguchi thinks the virus may have the potential to mutate and some day return in a form that resists the vaccine. He wonders if humanity is inevitably doomed, and judging by the characters’ actions in this story, he’s probably right. Ooshimi and Akari are on a date and walk past a man having a coughing fit. The end… OR IS IT?

I hope so. The absolutely dreadful characters ruin a manga that’s only readable because of its obscure subject matter. This premise is far from being fully realized, though, as Emerging fails to make a story that’s truly gripping through its plausibility. It’s just a stupid thriller that’s intellectually dishonest despite posturing otherwise.

Regardless of how asinine every page of this story was, it’s not one of the worst things I’ve ever experienced. The manga has a brisk pace as each chapter attempts to address a specific aspect of an epidemic. One deals with panic, another deals with the discovery that the virus may be airborne, etc. It’s organized in “stages” much like how an actual virus outbreak progresses in real life, and it does a thorough, if frequently inaccurate, exploration of the basic problems of a virus epidemic.

Emerging is easy to read, and I dare say a bit fun, but it would’ve been immeasurably more entertaining and thought-provoking if any of it could have been believable. As it is, I wonder how much value it can give to any reader. Hopefully, a manga artist will tackle this subject again with greater sense. There’s no need to lie or exaggerate about a concept that’s inherently already gripping, and by doing so, you lose what makes that concept so compelling. Guess we’ll have to wait for a real outbreak of super Ebola. That’ll keep everyone at the edge of their seat way more than Emerging can.

(One year after writing this review, COVID-19 would devastate swathes of the Earth’s population.)