Upon reading Touring After the Apocalypse manga, I was immediately struck with a sense of familiarity. We've probably all read a few manga in which two girls scavenge for food and shelter after the end of the world, so my initial thought was that it felt like Girls' Last Tour, with the same melancholy inevitability. More than that, I just felt like the art was familiar, so when I learned that Sakae Saitō is also an artist for the Super Cub manga, I had my aha! moment. I quite like the manga for Super Cub and now that the manga has moved past the anime into Koguma's college years, I'm still hooked. The care Saito takes with both the ruined landscape and the vehicles in Touring After the Apocalypse, and the carefree way Youko and Airi go through that world, sparked that sense of nostalgia I was feeling.

Because the landscape through which we move is destroyed, flooded, or empty of human life or maintenance, we are given the time to approach things in ways we might not be able to now. No one is going to ride a motorbike on the Yurikamome rails across Tokyo Bay, but Youko and Airi will visit Tokyo Big Sight that way. Bridges have collapsed and tunnels have flooded, so they will always take the long way around. There is a lot of attention paid to the thriving of animals in this post-human world, as well. The Ueno Zoo is open, and Akihabara is a jungle filled with animals. The landscape is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

There are a lot of mysteries here. Obviously, the end of the world happened. Whatever caused it, there are no human bodies or remnants of the same. A few lingering cyborgs and androids seem to be functioning, but most of them only after Airi and Youko arrive and revive them. There's some mystery about Airi's abilities. How does Airi, called a “cyborg”, eat? Why does she sleep? How does she have emotions at all? Airi's goals are a bit of a mystery, as well. She declares she wants to go wherever Youko goes and seems to have no other function or agenda. Very human of her.

Youko herself presents more mystery. Her older sister, who left her a record of sights to see, also seems to be able to predict Youko's needs. When Airi freezes momentarily, suddenly, Youko gets just enough of a connection to learn where to take her to get a patch. At every location, Youko has visions of a world before the end, which often allow her to see those sites as they were before, filled with people and thriving. These visions allow her to navigate places she's never been.

There is no escaping the melancholy that pervades the story. Youko and Airi never see signs of any humans. They do meet artificial intelligences, although none as advanced or human-like as Airi. Every time they think they may have encountered a human, it turns out to be something programmed. They don't spend any time grieving; there's no sense of loss, not even as Youko follows in the footsteps of a sister she will never see again, which creates a strange cognitive dissonance between their situation and their experience of it.

At the climax of Volume 3, she and Airi are welcomed by name at an automated laboratory, where Airi is given that patch. Youko also finds herself subject to a physical. I can only presume that the punchline of this manga will be that there are no humans left alive at all, and Youko is herself a cyborg, with her “visions” being archived data or something similar. It's the only explanation that makes sense at the moment.

Because the story is driven (hah) by a motorbike enthusiast theme, we're seeing some locations that are not on the regular two-day bus tour from Tokyo. The chapter centering Honda's Motegi Mobility Park is clearly an invitation to other motorbike otaku to visit and enjoy speed-related exhibits. The visit to the aforementioned Tokyo Bight Sight is to remind motorcycle otaku that there is a great motorcycle show there. Discussions of sites with amazing views of Tokyo, Mt Fuji, or other sites are a reminder that, hey, the world isn't over – you can see them now.

While these mysteries fill the space where a plot might go, I'm not sure that I want to know the answers. What possible circumstance that might cause the end of the world as we know it would be a fun read? How many ways in which humans destroyed themselves would make me enjoy this story more? And would Youko's mysterious older sister be more interesting if she were a real person who is now gone, or a previous model of a cyborg…or even a researcher who helped build Youko and/or Airi? The point of this manga is not to answer these questions, but to remind us how delicious duck is, to have some freeze-dried astronaut ice cream at the planetarium gift shop, and get us back out on the road to see more cool views from highways that are currently totally functional and not yet full of the remains of the human society destruction.