Katsuhiro Otomo's Domu is haunting. Based on a true story of a series of unresolved deaths, most likely suicides, in a Japanese apartment complex, Otomo lends his own interpretation of the tale, which unsurprisingly includes children with telekenesis -- a staple of his work.Domu reads like a mystery. The reader gets a good sense of the housing complex, a community unto itself, through the seemingly mundane action that Otomo records therein. This is primarily acheived through second hand accounts of the suicides, provided by residents -- ancillary characters to the main narrative. In this way, the audience is able to develop a multidimensional perspective of the story as it is not only seen through the eyes of the victim, the killer or the police -- as is so often the case in a mystery, but the passerby as well.
And perhaps this is why Domu works so well. One of these passersby, seemingly the most benign of all the characters -- an old man who seems lost in a world of his own senility is actually the source of the malevolence. The old man, completely insane and actually possessing the intellect of a small child, is in reality a powerful psychic who compels random victims to end their own lives. This theme, tele or psychokinesis as Otomo likes to call it, is a key feature of his work, most notably his Akira series.
This theme is not only explored by the old man, the story's antagonist, but by it protagonist as well, a young girl who is a new resident of the complex and secretly a powerful psychokinetic herself. Ultimately she defeats the old man and restores order to the housing complex, but the artfulness of this battle: an old man with the intellect of a child versus an actual child does not escape Otomo and makes for a truly amazing reading experience.
