Dear Anemone: A Beautifully Horrific Manga Fans of Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku Would Love

While it may have had a very short-lived run in Shueisha’s Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine, Dear Anemone by Rin Matsui was an interesting blend of body horror tropes and the beauty of nature in a story that fans of Yūji Kaku’s Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku would enjoy for their various similarities. Dear Anemone boasted an immensely creepy atmosphere bolstered by Matsui’s incredible art, but it could not quite stick around, as it was canceled after 17 chapters.

What it offered was a unique premise centered on evolution, set on the island that Charles Darwin himself once dubbed “the Laboratory of Evolution”: the Galápagos Islands. Here’s why you should check out the Dear Anemone manga, especially if you enjoyed Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku.

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Plot and Background

Monsters Await at the Galápagos

Dear Anemone follows Gaku Hachiue, a timid 19-year-old man who, for reasons not revealed, finds himself aboard a ship to the Galápagos Islands alongside several other misfits and individuals on the fringes of society. They are tasked with the retrieval of very important scientific research located at a laboratory found somewhere in the middle of the island, as well as to verify the survival of a group that was sent to the Galápagos about a year prior. When they arrive, they are immediately met with monstrous beasts the likes of which have never been seen anywhere else, beasts that indicate a completely different evolutionary timeline for the flora and fauna found there.

Gaku’s specific reason for going to the island is to find his friend, who was part of the previous expedition and hasn’t been heard from since. While suffering the terror of being attacked by monstrous animals and plants, Gaku encounters an anemone that also happens to be humanoid, and in an attempt to consume him, the two become entwined, changing his constitution to something not quite human. Dear Anemone, created by Rin Matsui, ran for 17 chapters in Shueisha’s Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine from February to June 2024. It was collected into 2 volumes. The series was also published digitally as an English simulpub through MANGA Plus.

So What Exactly Went Wrong?

Why Recommend a Dead Series?

What ended up being Dear Anemone’s undoing boiled down to a very important aspect: it lacks a discernible identity, as far as its story goes. Originality isn’t real, but there can be some inventive ways to make use of even the biggest clichés. The series’ lack of identity can be felt in how little effort it takes to situate the reader in its world and in the subjectivity of the protagonist, who is every timid protagonist you’ve ever seen once again coming into contact with a mind and body-altering pathogen or second entity that resides within their body.

This is a story beat that we get in shōnen works all the time: Jujutsu Kaisen, BLEACH, Naruto, Chainsaw Man, Black Clover, The Seven Deadly Sins, even Demon Slayer; to some extent, have all presented some kind of variation on the “inner demon” trope in shōnen, but each one has come with some kind of immutable, unforgettable spin on the main character’s relationship with this foreign element made local.

Dear Anemone, in its execution, is actually quite similar to Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte -the maxim-, a seinen science-fiction body horror thriller, in which a timid protagonist inadvertently has to share his body with an alien parasite that failed to take over his brain as per their usual payload. Both protagonists end up having a life-altering melding of physiologies with this foreign element, turning them into some kind of superhuman, and in both cases, the foreign element remains in control of the new body to some extent. What Dear Anemone failed to do was lay out the world it was trying to portray, and trust in the plot.

Despite its brilliant art and flashes of narrative promise, the choice to go with threading shōnen tropes together with fights the personal stakes of which are unclear, rather than prioritize narrative strength and highlight the series’ uniqueness, led it to failing as an unfortunately uninspired iteration of what it could’ve been. The emotional beats lack impact because the characters aren’t very endearing, yet it tries to make you care about them more than you want to. Dear Anemone, unfortunately, stands as proof that great visual fidelity isn’t the thing a manga needs to succeed.

What Dear Anemone Does Well

Dial Up the Creepy Factor

Why Dear Anemone could be a good read for fans of Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku is due to the similarities in their set-up. Both feature groups of characters who are sent to some kind of island where strange experiments have led to the development of a never-before-seen threat. Both series have great visual appeal due to their art styles, which also lend themselves to being creepier and better expressive of aspects like blood and gore.

The use of the language of flowers to inspire characters and thematic writing was also quite interesting, and there was a lot of potential for deeper interrogations of themes like the pursuit of one’s purpose, as well as what separates humans from beasts. Dear Anemone also presents all of these things with the thematic undercurrent of immortality at its centre. The perspective of using the Galápagos as the site of the story’s development fits well with the evolution concept central to the story, especially when the story gets to the part where a society of sentient bunnies now thrives in the islands’ central town of Puerto Ayora.

The art is brilliant, especially when it comes to the monstrosities littered across the island. “Beautifully horrific” is a phrase that fits the series’ art quite well. As gory as it can be, the art in Dear Anemone also has a deeply enchanting quality. Many would describe the series as “Animorphs” if it were a horror manga, as it turns out that some of the characters have some kind of DNA abnormality that grants them the ability to transform, although anime fans would more readily compare it to something like Terraformars (which doesn’t put the series in the best company), especially with the informative tidbits about animals and plants that pop up from time to time. Overall, it’s a short read that has some basic similarities to Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku, but takes a more science-fiction route with its story. In its latter chapters, Dear Anemone suffers from not having a solid foundation, so despite the quality improving somewhat, it was a case of too little, too late.