The “Real Darkness of Today” depicted by “Otori: Excessive Injury Control Officer, Utako Ikarame,” a firefighter who extinguishes flames on the Internet.

In the past few years, “flames” have been breaking out every day on the Internet. Most recently, the “Peropero Boy” who uploaded a video of himself licking soy sauce jugs and teacups at Sushiro, a major sushi chain, is still fresh in our minds. His name, school, and home were identified, and many people came to his house or called the school to protest. The situation became so unusual that the original victim, Sushiro, issued a comment demanding that the situation be calmed down.

When members of a female idol group are reported by a weekly photo magazine to be having a “secret meeting” with a man, their social networking sites go up in flames, and when a celebrity makes an unintentional post on Twitter, they are quickly slammed. It is the seed that one has sown. There is no doubt that it is wrong, but the trend that “if a dog falls into water, you can beat it no matter how much you want” is only getting stronger.

A manga that takes a close-up look at this latest social situation is “Otori-The Excessive Injury Control Officer: Utako Ikarame,” the long-awaited first volume of which was just released on the 21st of last month. The manga was the talk of the town last year when it won overwhelming support from readers in the “Serialization Winning Match” competition held in the magazine “Weekly D Morning.

The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (MHLW) has established the “Overkill Control Department, Mental Health Security Bureau, Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare,” an organization to control online flame wars. The story is about two of its employees, Utako Ikarame and Fumiya Geii, who patrol the Internet and rush to extinguish flaming incidents one by one as they come across them. The most appealing aspect of the story is the human drama in which they protect “people on fire” from the flames, sometimes harshly and sometimes warmly, such as a young girl who commits suicide and is seriously considering taking her own life after being agitated by viewers out of loneliness, and a disappointed comedian who almost loses his job after his past statements are dredged up in a firestorm.

The gags inserted even at the edges of the pages are also worth reading. This is Reiwa’s “story of good and evil” that should be read only in this day and age.

Click here to purchase “Otori: Excessive Injury Control Officer Shiko Ikarame”.