Teru and his high school class are returning from a field trip when a catastrophic something derails their train, burying them in a tunnel and killing nearly everyone aboard. Among the hellish heap of mangled bodies Teru discovers two survivors, but their nightmare has only just begun. Trapped in unending shadow with sudden, violent earthquakes shaking their sanity, the three must find a way to escape to the outside world and make it back home—if home still exists…

Dragon Head has story and art by Minetarō Mochizuki. English translation by Dylan Thompson and lettering by Elena Pizarro Lanzas and Anthony Quintessenza. Published by Vertical (December 16, 2025). Rated M.

CW: sexual assault, gore, violence

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Minetarō Mochizuki's seinen disaster manga Dragon Head won the twenty-first Kodansha Manga Award, and I hate it. Not that it won the award – Mochizuki's craft is excellent, particularly the horrible, grinding claustrophobia the characters are stuck in, with the feeling of impending doom hovering like a dark ceiling over all. But the story is so unremittingly grim, and any crumb of hope turns to dust within pages of being offered. It enjoys wallowing in despair, and that's really not something I enjoy in my fiction.

If you do, though, run out and pick this up. Vertical's new release (Tokyopop 1.0 released it back in the day) makes it easy – their version is the multi-volume omnibus edition, with over 500 pages per book. The length is a real bonus, because this isn't the sort of story that you want to put down and ruminate on; it's a desperate page-turner of a book. I nearly stopped multiple times, thinking someone else could handle this one, but I kept picking it back up, and since I didn't even enjoy what I was reading, that's saying something.

The story itself is basic apocalyptic fiction: while on their way back from a school trip to Kyoto, a bullet train full of Tokyo high school kids derails in a tunnel. Just before the train entered it, Teru thought he saw a pillar of red ascending to the sky – or possibly descending from it – and that's all the warning he had about what's to come. When he opens his eyes after the wreck, he's the only living person in his train car. The tunnel is blocked by a landslide at both ends. The air inside the tunnel is unnaturally hot, and his attempt to pick up a signal with a radio he finds (this series dates to the mid-90s, so no cell phones), he gets a staticky message about a disaster. Eventually, he does find two other survivors, but Nobuo goes mad, leaving Teru and Ako to escape on their own. But escaping Nobuo and the tunnel is more of an out of the frying pan, into the fire situation – there's no real help to be found in what is clearly a ruined world.

The intensity of the pacing is what really makes this book work. Although it indulges in gratuitousness on almost every front – the gore, the fact that Ako has her period, Nobuo's assault of Ako while she's unconscious – it mostly makes it seem like it has to to drive home how wrong the entire situation is. By the time Nobuo paints himself with the blood of the dead and begins worshipping the darkness, it feels like something that had to happen. Things only really falter when you stop to think about them, something the book doesn't want you to do.

Although I didn't enjoy Dragon Head and I don't care for Mochizuki's art style, it's hard to deny that this is a well-done book. If you like disaster stories, don't let it pass you by. But if you prefer your disasters to have a more psychological edge and less gratuitousness, I'd suggest hunting down Vertical's release of Keiko Suenobu's The Limit instead.

Bolts
Rating:

Being buried alive is probably very high on the list of ways that I don't want to die. The anxiety, the darkness, and the literal and psychological suffocation fill me with too much dread to think about. So obviously, I wasn't in the best headspace reading through Dragon Head, but I think that's just a testament to how well this made me feel trapped. There's the claustrophobia, the passage of time, and the wonder if you'll ever see your loved ones ever again. This book encapsulates all of those elements through its characterization and presentation.

We have some high schoolers who are trapped in a tunnel while on their way back home from a trip, and for the majority of the book, I was just trapped in this tunnel with these kids. In fact, I was surprised that there is more story to tell outside of this volume because the way it builds up that suspense and mystery is really engaging. There are lingering mysteries going on in the background about what caused the incident in the first place and just how bad things are actually going to get, but I don't think that was the main draw. Sometimes a story can just be about a hopeless situation, and you can admire how well the authors capture that.

The tradeoff is that this is a story that is very hard to recommend, giving it extreme subject matter. Severe isolation and darkness can mess with a person's psyche. When you apply that to teenagers who are also in a very delicate phase in their lives, it's very easy for them to go off the deep end, especially since the book doesn't rule out the possibility that there are also supernatural forces at work. There were genuinely some scenes in this book that were uncomfortable to read, and I could debate about the necessity of them, but you could also debate about whether or not these scenes could have gone further to illustrate the overall point. The point itself is that most of this book is very bleak, and I don't see anybody walking away from this story feeling particularly good about anything.

As a work of art, it checks all the right boxes. The character designs are a bit bland, but the panel layouts and the way the book itself captures isolation are incredibly poignant. I'm curious about the circumstances that led to the book's inciting incident, I'm curious how far certain elements go, and I want to see the fate of our main characters on the other end. If you're interested in reading something a bit more on the depressing or perverse side, then definitely give this a read. Sometimes you want to feel a little bit unsettled.