The Spring 2025 Manga Guide

Touch Within the Abyss

What's It About? 

Hitman Chinatsu once failed to pull the trigger on his target and it cost him his brother's life. That day, the sole witness who took Chinatsu's trembling hand had clear eyes that stared right through him... straight into the abyss within.

Five years later, a purse-snatching reunites Chinatsu with his savior: Kasumi, a young blind man searching for a way out of his own lonely world. Chinatsu knows better than to get involved with a potential witness, but he can't help but be drawn to Kasumi's radiant smile. If Kasumi knew the truth of their provenance, could he ever forgive the sins of Chinatsu's past?

Touch Within the Abyss has a story and art by Moyori Mori. English translation by Jacqueline Fung. Lettering by Vibraant Publishing Studio. Published by Tokyopop (March 25, 2025). Rated OT.

---

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

There's something about Touch Within the Abyss that makes me want to love it more than I actually did. The art is soft and dreamlike, with a slight sense of being out of focus that creates a sort of yearning feel. The story is heartfelt, about two young men trying to find a place to belong and a person to belong there with. It's ultimately about redemption and self-discovery. These are all part of the recipe for a very sweet story.

That means that the greatest tragedy of this work is not the fraught family situations of both Chinatsu and Kasumi, but that somehow these elements don't fully come together to create a wonderful story. It really ought to work better than it does, and while I did end up enjoying it quite a bit, it still didn't entirely work. In part this is because of the narrow focus of the plot – despite the issues both young men struggle with, the story is laser-focused on their relationship. Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely one; both of them help to soothe each other's souls and there's an attractive gentleness to their slow slide into love. But in a single-volume story, the fact that Chinatsu's assassin past – and how his dad got into that business in the first place and how it led to him killing his wife, which is just sort of dropped into the book at random – is so underexplained ends up undermining his character. Kasumi, meanwhile, just has one moment when it's mentioned that his blindness has led to him being isolated in the gigantic inn his family runs because his mother worries about “appearances.” How? Why? What does Kasumi think about it? We never get real answers.

Since a decent part of the plot involves Kasumi and Chinatsu finding acceptance with each other that no one else offers them, leaving these details out kneecaps the romance. Not entirely; this is still heartwarming. But it could have been so much more.

---

Lauren Orsini
Rating:

I was so sure that the titular abyss of this title was going to refer to the fact that one of the romantic leads is blind. But it's really about the deep emptiness inside the other lead, Chinatsu, who has spent his life training as a reluctant assassin. It takes Kasumi, an unseeing witness to one of Chinatsu's crimes, to reach through that darkness to Chinatsu's real self. A dark andbloody story with incongruously pretty, fragile-looking characters and a flowy, feminine style, this feels like an art book of the author's favorite things more so than an immersive plot.

Chinatsu is a hitman who can't pull the trigger—and for this moment of weakness, he blames himself for his brother's death. Kasumi ends up witnessing the event, but only in the most superficial of ways. Kasumi is blind, but on that day, Chinatsu felt like Kasumi gazed straight into the abyss of his soul. When the two are reunited by chance, Chinatsu can't get the kind-eyed boy out of his mind. Kasumi, for his part, finds solace in Chinatsu as an escape from his lonely existence in his family's huge, stifling Japanese-style villa. Chinatsu takes Kasumi outdoors, where he describes flowers to him and to the aquarium, where he describes jellyfish to him. But there's no way Chinatsu's already-disapproving father is going to let his failson cavort with a potential witness to a crime. Plus, Chinatsu is privately agonized about Kasumi finding out the truth of his profession. Can these two find happiness, or are their lives too different?

With poetic dialogue and flowery, feathery art, Touch Within the Abyss definitely falls more on the side of style than substance. It takes place in modern times, but with its traditional Japanese backdrops, it is basically timeless. In the postscript, the author wrote that they wanted a story that tied together all the things they like best “the height difference, the raw and bloody setting, the Japanese kimono… the two suffering boys,” and it certainly has all of those things, tossed in like items on a checklist. This is a beautiful manga, to be sure. But tying together all this prettiness is only the most threadbare of plots.