After a heart-stopping encounter with an unearthly apparition, a young woman becomes fixated on the spirits that linger in the shadows. Drawn into a chilling journey to confront the very essence of fear, she steps into a world where the boundary between the living and the dead fades into oblivion.

Written by Noct Koike and brought to life by the haunting artwork of Chika Ishikawa (KOBAN), Ghostly Darkness of Kanata takes you on a nerve-wracking adventure into the unknown. Every page pulses with the tension of everyday moments—suddenly infected with the uncanny, as spirits and phantoms intrude on a world that seems so familiar.

As the heroine delves deeper into the occult, her quest to understand the afterlife soon reveals that terror doesn't always come from the unknown—it hides in the places we think we know best. The ghosts she seeks might just be the ones chasing her.

The Ghostly Darkness of Kanata has story and art by Nokuto Koike. English translation is done by Cynthia Caraturo and lettering by Tom Williams. Published by Titan Manga (December 9, 2025). Rated M.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

This is so, so close to being something special. It's got an interesting premise: Kanata, who has apparently descended into functional alcoholism, can see ghosts and use them as gateways to the world of the dead. She seeks them out, but for no discernible reason, which is perhaps strike one. Strike two is that none of the stories in this volume reach any sort of conclusion, which I suppose is the natural extension of strike one. There's no strike three yet, which is why this isn't rated one, but it is perilously close to feeling like a waste of good reading time.

The volume follows Kanata over the course of four ghostly encounters. The first is an old woman dragging her dead dog, constantly repeating a string of numbers; Kanata figures out that they must be the license plate of the car that killed her. The second is a teacher trying to find out why her student isn't coming to school, which shifts over into a generalized haunted piece of playground equipment. The third follows a streamer trying to prove she can see ghosts, and the final story covers another haunted location, where rivers were covered in order to build housing after WWII. This one is the most promising, in part because there could be more of it in volume two (the others clearly end, albeit with zero resolution), but also because it seems to be tackling the death of a place rather than a person. It's a more unique premise than any of the others, although I have limited hope that it will pan out.

That's because pretty much nothing else does in this book. We get hints about Kanata's past in one chapter, but apart from her penchant for near-constant alcohol consumption and ability to see ghosts, we know nothing else about her. She's a flimsy guide leading us through half-baked stories, and while some of the art is appropriately creepy, it's undercut by the lack of narrative follow through. It's immensely disappointing, because this had scads of potential, but after this, I can't even be bothered to want to seek out volume two to see if it improves.

Kevin Cormack
Rating:

Horror manga can be very difficult to get right. Too outlandish and it can veer into comedy territory. (Not that it ever stopped Junji Ito, mind. Some of his best work is hilariously nutty.) Too dark and serious and it can be depressing and unpleasant to read. The Ghostly Darkness of Kanata is a lot like Mieruko-chan, but without the humor, making it a slog to endure.

For the supposed protagonist, Kanata spends entire chapters on the sidelines while we follow others and their disturbing encounters with the supernatural. From a young schoolteacher searching for a missing student in a creepy playpark to a man finding a boarded-up shrine hidden in the cramped passageways between houses, The Ghostly Darkness of Kanata attempts to generate dread from seemingly normal aspects of our urbanized world. At times, it certainly succeeds.

Ghosts are depicted as distorted figures, half-melted, swathed in shadow. They tend to haunt the places where they died, and in one particularly gruesome chapter, a ghost of a suicide victim throws itself off a building, spectral body splatting onto the ground below, invisible to all but one spiritually sensitive woman. She freaks out that no one else can see the blood-soaked body in the middle of the street.

From her limited appearances in this first volume, I didn't find Kanata to be a particularly interesting heroine, and the story's overly grim nature didn't compel me to continue reading. If anything, I found this volume something of a chore to finish. There's little here I haven't already seen before, and done better, in other manga and anime like Mieruko-chan and Dark Gathering.