The Fall 2019 Manga Guide

Marginal Operation

What's It About? 

Arata is thirty years old with no job prospects when his company goes under. Unwilling to go back to mooching off his parents, he goes to a job interview for “Operators,” a strange job where the interview consists of being willing to push a button that executes someone in a foreign country. Assuming that it's all a game and lured in by the signing bonus, Arata agrees to take the job, only to be sent to Tajikistan and told never to call himself a “mercenary” or a “soldier.”

There he learns the terrible truth that he's been trying to avoid acknowledging: that this is no game, and he's remotely directing the actual operations of real soldiers in a war. Marginal Operation is based on the light novel of the same name by Yūri Shibamura.

The manga has art by Daisuke Kimura and was released by J-Novel Club digitally ($8.99) in October. A physical release ($14.99) will come out in December.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

The final page of this volume states that “the events recorded in this manga are based off the state of the world in the time it was written,” so any similarities to the ways in which technology distances us from the horrors of war are entirely intentional. Sadly that doesn't entirely keep the book from feeling like a more adult version of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series, although it also isn't strictly fair to call this any sort of rip-off. Rather it treads similar ground and forces its protagonist, Arata, to decide if he can live with the consequences of his actions when he's not even allowed to call himself a soldier.

It's a question worth asking, as is the underlying theme of whether or not we should use technological advances that keep the blood and death on the battlefield as far away from the people giving the orders as possible. I certainly don't have an answer to that having grown up with a grandfather wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, and I appreciate that this volume at least doesn't seem to be making any major judgements just yet. Instead it focuses solely on Arata himself and his own feelings of isolation, regret, and failure, and that helps us as readers to understand more of why he does what he does, whether or not we agree with it.

The major downside is that it takes just a bit too long to get to the payoff of the book. For most of the first half, we're just watching Arata try to figure out what to do with his life and then apparently playing the world's least interesting video game. (Although honestly, in a world where Orson Scott Card exists, many readers will have figured out the twist early on.) By the time Arata learns the truth, the book is three-quarters done and has barely touched on the point of the sex worker he visits as a character in the story. It's clear that she's not just there for the fanservice, but she still feels sort of extraneous at this point, which is too bad. Daisuke Kimura does his best with the artwork, which is generally fine, but there's only so much to be done with as much talking and staring at screens with dull graphics, making the book visually boring. Hopefully the light novels will make an appearance in English at some point, because this story feels worth telling – manga doesn't doesn't seem to be the right format for it.