Joseph Luster
December 13, 2012 
In our review of the first volume of Limit—an unconventional shoujo manga by Keiko Suenobu—we decided to kick it off by keeping the cat in the bag as much as possible. Well, if you’re still reading then hopefully you’re well aware of Limit‘s savage premise, because volume two continues to spiral down the rocky road of survival, showing how much it helps to have something to live for when confronted with a true life or death situation.
In the first volume of Limit, an otherwise mundane school trip was turned upside down thanks to a brutal bus crash, which left most of the all-female class dead. Those who managed to escape the wreckage, including protagonist Mizuki Konno, are left to fend for themselves in the wild, under the mercy of a formerly-shunned student who wants nothing more than to let those who roamed in cliques and clubs suffer. With the tables turned, the greater concern becomes acclimating to a new dynamic without resorting to killing one another before help can even arrive.
Suenobu’s art continues to be one of the manga’s chief attractions. It manages to retain a quintessentially shoujo aesthetic while grinding in a special kind of grittiness, especially when it comes to depicting a character’s psychological tumult. The typically pristine lines remain intact while grainy, crosshatch-heavy shadows build around them, a technique that’s at its best here when one of the girls’ paranoia kicks in full-swing.
A prominent theme of this volume is surviving by figuring out what it is you have to live for. Konno quickly discovers that one of her fellow classmates, Chieko Kamiya, gets her will to live from her family back home. She’s able to stay strong because she’s one of five children, and she would do anything to make it home and see them again. Four simple words, “live to go home,” help steel Konno’s resolve; a crucial beat in the story.
There’s also the question of how the school is going to handle a bus full of students that never made it to their destination. That’s addressed in this volume, and unfortunately, key members of the faculty are more concerned with where the hell this expensive bus could have gone off to than what happened to the students who were on it. The search is ongoing, but at this rate the kids are more likely to kill each other before anyone in the outside world finds out what dire straits they’re truly in.
The stakes waver in volume two, and don’t always seem as high as they were initially. Sure, the malevolent Morishige is as unpredictable as ever, but everyone else seems to be getting on the same page when it comes to making it through this scenario in one piece. Naturally, just as things seem to be leveling out, Suenobu tosses in a wrinkle in the final pages, so it should be interesting to see what happens next. Despite a few moments in which the narrative appears to get a bit too comfortable, Limit remains an exciting, genre-blending tale of survival that comes recommended to all.
Publisher: Vertical Inc.
Story & Art: Keiko Suenobu
© 2012 Keiko Suenobu
