Pure Trance

(Last Gasp, 2005)
™ and © 2005 Mizuno Junko

There may well come a day when some psychiatrist and mathematician chart the most quantifiable shapes pleasant to the human brain, and Junko Mizuno’s soft shapes will surely chart high on the cute meter. This is probably how she gets away with so much grotesquerie without losing the reader.

Pure Trance takes place in the future, when another World War has sent humans underground. Since farming is hard, an artificial food pill called “Pure Trance” has been developed, but brings with it a sort of pharmaceutical bulimia. Our story centers on a hospital run by a tyrannically evil director, more concerned with sex toys and her next fix than doing her job, despite great skill as a surgeon. Thrust in the middle of this is Nurse Aiko, a newcomer who makes friends and enemies among the other caretakers.

A remarkably durable innocence permeates this Yellow Submarine fugue, despite all the bondage, beatings and bare bodies. Oh yes, and chainsawed limbs. Mizuno seasons the broth with Pure Trance Trivia, which supplements the material nicely, and actually presents a few ideas worth implementing in real society.

— Brendan McGinley

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