Manga like Glass no Shiro no Kiroku

Kirihito Sanka

Also known as Ode to Kirihito.

Status: Finished
Genres: Drama , Psychological

Two doctors, the young, passionate and well-liked Osanai and the veteran, ambitious Tatsugaura, are both investigating the mysterious 'Monmow' disease, found only in one remote village, which causes bizarre bone deformation, making its victims take on a beastlike appearance before their deaths.

Osanai is sent to the village by Tatsugaura to see if he can find a cause for the disease while also treating the victims to the best of his ability. But in reality, Tatsugaura is scheming against Osanai and intends to infect him with the disease in order to clear the way of any obstacles of presenting his own research, and thus gaining high prestige and rank in the medical world.

Tags: Medicine , Conspiracy , Philosophy , Seinen , Foreign , Body Horror , Ensemble Cast , Male Protagonist , Gore , Primarily Adult Cast , Drugs , Nudity

MW

Also known as MW.

Status: Finished
Genres: Drama , Psychological , Thriller

Michio Yuki has it all: looks, intelligence, a pedigree as the scion of a famous Kabuki family, a promising career at a major bank, legions of female admirers. But underneath the sheen of perfection lurks a secret with the power to shake the world to its foundations.

During a boyhood excursion to one of the southern archipelagos near Okinawa, Yuki barely survived exposure to a poison gas stored at a foreign military facility. The leakage annihilated all of the island’s inhabitants but was promptly covered up by the authorities, leaving Yuki as an unacknowledged witness—one whose sense of right and wrong, however, the potent nerve agent managed to obliterate.

Now, fifteen years later, Yuki is a social climber of Balzacian proportions, infiltrating the worlds of finance and politics by day while brutally murdering children and women by night—perversely using his Kabuki-honed skills as a female impersonator to pass himself off as the women he’s killed. His drive, however, will not be satiated with a promotion here and a rape there. Michio Yuki has a far more ominous objective: obtaining MW, the ultimate weapon that spared his life but robbed him of all conscience.

There are only two men with any hope of stopping him: one, a brilliant public prosecutor who struggles to build a case against the psychopath; the other, a tormented Catholic priest, Iwao Garai, who shares Yuki’s past—and frequently his bed.



Tags: Seinen , Conspiracy , Politics , Crossdressing , Urban , Torture , Crime , Psychosexual , Primarily Adult Cast , Religion , Nudity , Boys' Love , Bisexual , Zoophilia , Age Gap , Suicide , Espionage

Ayako

Also known as Ayako.

Status: Finished
Genres: Drama

Opening a few years after the end of World War II and covering almost a quarter-century, here is comics master Osamu Tezuka’s most direct and sustained critique of Japan’s fate in the aftermath of total defeat. Unusually devoid of cartoon premises yet shot through with dark voyeuristic humor, Ayako looms as a pinnacle of Naturalist literature in Japan with few peers even in prose, the striking heroine a potent emblem of things left unseen following the war.

The year is 1949. Crushed by the Allied Powers, occupied by General MacArthur’s armies, Japan has been experiencing massive change. Agricultural reform is dissolving large estates and redistributing plots to tenant farmers—terrible news, if you’re landowners like the archconservative Tenge family. For patriarch Sakuemon, the chagrin of one of his sons coming home alive from a P.O.W. camp instead of having died for the Emperor is topped only by the revelation that another of his is consorting with “the reds.” What solace does he have but his youngest Ayako, apple of his eye, at once daughter and granddaughter?



Tags: Historical , Politics , Seinen , Espionage , Tragedy , Rural , Incest , Fugitive , Crime , Yakuza , Time Skip , Police , Nudity , Urban , Rehabilitation , Gangs

Tsumi to Batsu

Also known as Crime and Punishment.

Status: Finished
Genres: Drama , Psychological , Slice of Life

In Russia, on the eve of the revolution, a young student named Raskolnikov murders an old pawnbroker over a pocket watch. Although an innocent man is quickly arrested for the crime, Raskolnikovs’s own published essay - suggesting that people who are “extra-ordinary” are above such things as “right” and “wrong” - draws the suspicion of judge Porfiry. Who will catch up to Raskolnikov first? Porfiry … or his own guilty conscience?



Tags: Foreign , Classic Literature , Historical , Shounen , Philosophy