Even the hardest veterans of Shonen Jump agree: The Trembling Right Hand is one of the worst manga we've ever read
I say this despite the last feature on this newsletter being a slam review of a promising but ultimately disappointing anime: I don’t really like to write negative reviews, not anymore. I would rather not be let down in the first place. And I don’t really like to kick a work or creator while it’s down, so to speak. And I’m definitely about to do that here. Because some works are egregious.
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The Trembling Right Hand (Furueru Migite) is a mystery/horror manga that recently concluded in Jump+ after a brief, possibly truncated run. This is not a comic that’s possible to discuss in any depth without spoiling due to its nature, and the narrative is so bad that it is not worth applying the restraint of avoiding spoilers when describing it, so consider this your warning.
A manga artist with a successful serialization of an edgy kid’s blood-and-gore crime comic finds out that his mysterious writer, pen name Kalon, might be sourcing the series’ trademark grisly kills from murders they’re actually performing in real life. Thus begins a search for the identity of Kalon among his assistants and staff. That actually sounds pretty cool— indeed, in 2024 writer Riki Someya won the grand prize in Jump+’s annual rookie one-shot contest in order to earn this serialization— but it’s all downhill from there.
The manga’s core problem is that it’s so obsessed with shocking readers with left-field, unguessable twists that both its plot and characters are completely incoherent. Someya ensures you can’t guess the next twist by simply never supplying any of the basic information or character insight which could be read as a hint, and then slamming you every chapter with a reveal that you quite literally couldn’t have seen coming. Mystery invites the reader to engage with it by following along and theorizing as they go, enjoying the sensation of being kept in suspense by an author who's holding all the cards. Right Hand just throws everything we know into the trash every chapter. Shock over suspense. This isn’t really mystery anymore; it’s barely even storytelling.
Zero time is given to let any suspense build or to get to know any of the characters (including, crucially, the protagonist) as the plot zooms along. That’s a big problem, as the plot consists largely of implicating a different character as Kalon every week, and then forgetting they exist in the next chapter. If I don’t get to know a character, I don’t really care when ten pages after meeting them, they turn to face the camera with evil eyes like Michael Jackson at the end of Thriller. I especially don’t care when that happens over and over, with literally every character we meet.
Can you believe that even this character suddenly flipped out and tried to kill the hero? Well yeah, I can, as that’s the only thing anybody’s done in this entire story.
At the halfway point, Trembling Right Hand literally crashes a car into a nonsense final arc, with a chain of brand-new revelations that appear to have been completely made up on the spot. In short, the reason the manga was able to get away with teasing that everyone was the killer is that, of course, they were: Kalon is a manga studio/murder cult established specifically to re-awaken the main character’s childhood memories… of being a psychotic murderer himself! The majority of characters we have met in this comic have flipped out and transformed into smirking edgelord killers at this point, so it stands to reason that our hero would finally join in on the bit.
The manga closes with an idiotic fast-forward final chapter in which everybody in the story— including a character that Kalon nearly killed Saw-style in the previous chapter— has joined the cult and are happily kidnapping and murdering random criminals off the street, with absolutely no consequences. The punchline, which the manga thinks is really brilliant and not cliche at all, is that they publish a book about these true events that’s so detailed it’s effectively a confession… and it’s the book you’re reading right now. AAAAHHHH!!
It’s perhaps fitting that a comic about a mysterious, omnipotent serial killer author is one of the worst-written published stories I’ve ever read. It’s downright funny that people in the story criticize the in-universe Tokyo Crime comic for having genius writing but mediocre art, when The Trembling Right Hand itself features stylish and attractive art courtesy of Toyotaka Haneda, carrying incompetent writing.
It’s possible, as its rushed conclusion implies, that Right Hand was canceled during its run. If you’re not familiar, Jump manga usually get a few chapters to wrap up the story and say goodbye before they get canceled: if you’ve ever read a battle action manga where the main villain was suddenly defeated in a single chapter without the appropriate buildup, or which abruptly fast-forwarded to the characters as adults after all the battles have been won… it probably got canceled. Jump fans call titles cut off this way the U-19 (under 19) club. (This comic ends at 17 chapters.) This pattern would explain the way Right Hand spits out its ending and epilogue in two chapters, but I couldn’t find anything definitive even searching Japanese-language sources. Might be one of those “we won’t call it a cancellation” situations.
But Trembling Right Hand was awful well before the point at which it got cancelled. I realized what I was in for a few chapters in, and looking comments around the English and Japanese internet, manga readers seem quite united in the experience they had with this series: “worst manga I’ve ever read” was about the baseline. “I guess you can do a worse ending than Chainsaw Man’s” was another common sentiment.
Yet there’s a certain “enjoyed the ride” feeling evident in the response: we all knew this comic sucked from the moment the hero's girlfriend pulled out that gun. But it was bad in an interesting enough way that we all kept reading it every week for the next absurd reveal. I wouldn’t exactly call The Trembling Right Hand a manga equivalent of The Room— The Room is at least funny— but it did accomplish at least part of its goal as a page-turner. That’s more than you can say for Drama Queen.
Anyway, since you read all this, I'll name a trashy, edgy revenge horror manga that's actually satisfying: Maria no Danzai (Maria's Judgment), or as I like to call it... MILF Saw. Enjoy!
