The Mud Whale lives on a seemingly endless sea of sand. On its back is a small city built of clay, powered by magic. Many of the Mud Whale inhabitants can use magic through strange marks on their bodies but it’s only the Unmarked who can’t use this thymia who live to become old and govern the city.
Chakuro is one of those magic-using children, albeit not a very good one, who lives aboard the Mud Whale and lives following the strange rhythms of this life. When the inhabitants of the Mud Whale discover a stranger on another island, the first human from outside their group that Chakuro has ever seen, it seems that their way of living is about to be greatly upended in a way they can’t even begin to fathom.
Now, it is natural for the first installment in a series to raise more questions than it answers (unless it is going to be a very short series with an accelerated timeline). So it’s perfectly fine that there are many mysteries surrounding Children Of The Whales when the first volume ends. But what’s not fine is the sheer number of mysteries and the way they are kept “mysteries.” Mangaka Abi Umeda thinks that explaining how the characters’ powers work in-depth is more interesting than even questioning “why are all of these characters living like exiles in the middle of a giant desert?” It takes the introduction of an outside character for these questions to even cross main character Chakuro’s mind and I’m not interested in following a story where a character is both out of the loop and unambitious about finding out what is going on (also, sidenote, Chakuro calls himself an “archivist” but if all they’re doing is writing a diary, then they’re actually just a records creator. At the very least you need more than one record to be an archivist!).
Part of my discontentment here is that I have become less and less of a fan of the set-up the series chooses to employ; the vast majority of the cast are children and it’s only some very old characters who understand what is going on and deliberately have created a power dynamic to keep it that way. I think that this is both cheap writing (since it’s an “easy” way to keep one group of characters in the dark while another group isn’t) and I’ve also just become disillusioned with this idea in general that governments are a leak-proof, cabal of authority figures and Umeda doesn’t write any of this compellingly enough to convince me otherwise.
Sure Umeda can draw quite a few pretty scenes of the strange lives everyone lives on the Mud Whale but, as lovely as these scenes are, they just feel like they are taking time away from the actual story and it creates a rather choppy sense of pacing. I do think that this slightly disjointed sense of urgency vs complacency felt by the characters is intentional and I think that Umeda is trying to highlight just how large the coming disruptions to their life will be. But it feels clumsily done, enough so that I was surprised to see that this is not Umeda’s first work.
I really wanted to like this first volume and I am willing to give the second volume, or the soon to be released from Netflix jail anime, a shot but that’s completely because of the visuals in the story and an interest in a few of the side characters. Outsider Lykos has potential to be an interesting character since she obviously has a past that has shaped her, so hopefully, she will turn out to be a major player in this story.
But otherwise, I feel like Umeda is trying too heavily to rely on a feeling of melancholy and impending tragedy instead of letting that feeling organically arise in the reader. We see that the characters are doomed to die young and they live in a precarious situation but the characters also seem content with that, and contentment isn’t something that works very well with “tragedy.” We’ll just have to see if Children of The Whales manages to resolve its mixed up priorities and ideas in future installments or if this story was just flat on arrival.