GOTH BY OTSUICHI

Goth concerns a pair of two disturbed outcasts named Boku and Morino who are both obsessed with death. The two disturbed teens are brought together through unusual means, circumstances befitting their twisted personalities. Before Morino is even aware of his existence, Boku has already had his sights set on her for quite some time. She was a lonely girl with cuts on her wrist and a past shrouded in darkness. He became infatuated with her hands that were covered in scars and as pale as a corpse. He could tell from a single glance that Morino was just as twisted as he was, and he becomes her dark guardian that preys on monsters like himself.

The first monster that Boku targets is a perverted man obsessed with collecting the severed hands of his victims. He discovers the killer’s notebook and finds records of his past crimes and who he plans to be his next victims. Boku is delighted by his morbid findings in the journal. Dolls, babies, children, men, women, animals, if they have hands the killer chops them off and brings them home.

It turns out that Morino’s lovely hands are the killer’s next target, and Boku exposes him before he’s able to kill her. Boku comes to Morino’s rescue just before the killer ends her life, and the two demented souls meet face-to-face for the first time. Boku is no noble knight in shining armor, however, he protects Morino from killers in hopes that he’ll one day have the chance to carve up her beautiful body and chop off her hands for himself. When Morino takes a liking to him despite being fully aware of what he wants to do to her, they realize that they were destined for each other. They’re both obsessed with death, one dreams of killing and one dreams of being killed. They follow death wherever it leads them, purposely throwing themselves in life-threatening situations and paying visits to the crime scenes of brutal murders to bask in the arousing atmosphere of decay.

Morino is a walking magnet for sickos and killers of every breed, including the main character himself. She uses her charm to lure in twisted souls and Boku punishes them by forcing them to confront their sins and perversions. Each story involves the morbid pair investigating crime scenes, provoking and exposing predators like themselves and taking pleasure in the sea of death that surrounds them everywhere they go.

There’s not much of a cohesive narrative, it’s much more about the morbid atmosphere and the exploration of disturbing acts such as staged suicide, harvesting body parts, the aroma ot rotting bodies, burying people alive and seeing how people react when they know they’re about to die. You’re essentially viewing the world through the eyes of soulless psychopaths that see no value in living things.

The only story I truly felt invested in was the last one which reveals the secrets of Morino’s identity and her dark childhood relationship with her twin sister. All in all, reading Goth is like walking into a gloomy forest and stumbling upon the butchered carcass that a serial killer left behind. There’s not much of a story to it, but it’s disturbing, gruesome and hard to look away from. Everyone is curious about death in one way or another, it’s an unavoidable part of life after all. We just have to make sure that our obsessions with morbid things don’t consume us to the point of losing our own humanity.