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Title: Tegami Bachi – Letter Bee Vol 1

Author: Hiroyuki Asada

Publisher: Viz

ISBN: 9781421529134

May Contain Spoilers

Tegami Bachi introduces a world of perpetual night, where brave Letter Bees delivers letters from town to town.  Amberground is a dangerous place, and the further away from the capital, Akatsuki, and its artificial sun, the darker and more dangerous it becomes.  Gauche Suede is on his last delivery before a promised promotion, and all he wants to do is get his last letter delivered. When he learns that the letter is actually Lag, a young boy whose mother was abducted, he’s not in for his usual delivery run.  Can he safely deliver the traumatized Lag to his final destination on the outskirts of Yodaka?

The premise of this series is really interesting.  Who doesn’t love deliverymen, especially when they bring you letters and packages?  I could live without a world of perpetual darkness, because that would be extremely cold and bleak, but in Tegami Bachi, the eternal night just raises the stakes for the Letter Bees.  Traversing isolated wastelands, they have to be constantly vigilant against Gaichuu, ferocious creatures that attack the Letter Bees when they sense their hearts.  With only a gun loaded with heart fragments and a carefully trained bodyguard to keep them company, the Bees don’t let anything get in the way of their work. 

This spin on postal workers makes the job seem so much more glamorous.  Tough and forced to survive by using their wits and being gutsy, the Letter Bees take their jobs seriously.  Gauche Suede’s major motivation for this hazardous occupation is pretty simple – he and his sister are on their own, and Gauche just wants to make enough money so that they can live comfortably and his sister can have an operation that she needs.  That was a little clichéd, but it’s easy to sympathize with so I’ll just run with it.  In order to live in more cushy surroundings, Gauche needs a promotion and a crossing pass.  The nation of Amberground is divided by caste into three river-bound districts, and the residents aren’t allowed to just mingle amongst each other.  Oh, no, there’s none of that.  In order to cross into another district, a crossing pass is required, and they are about as likely as finding a pot of gold under a rainbow in this constantly dark landscape.

I found the world building in Tegami Bachi a bit more interesting than the actual plot itself.  It’s not your run of the mill shounen action setting, and I liked that aspect of the story.  This volume follows Gauche Suede as he delivers Lag Seeing to his aunt’s house, and then picks up a few years later with an older Lag.  Lag wants to follow in Gauche’s footsteps and become a Letter Bee himself, and I am assuming that future volumes will follow him as he chases his dream and comes of age.  The problem is that I liked Gauche better than I liked Lag, so it was kind of a bummer when the focus of the story changed from one character to the other.

I really liked the art and the way Hiroyuki Asada uses white spaces.  It’s always evident that they are surrounded by darkness, but instead of constantly driving that fact home with heavy shading and tones, there are instead bursts of white to emphasize action sequences and to intensify dramatic moments in the story.  The character designs beg to be transformed into cos-play, and the postal workers of Amberground have a far better sense of fashion than my letter carrier will ever hope to attain.  I was not too fond of the Gaichuu, thinking that they resemble giant, repellent ticks. 

I am fascinated enough by the world of Tegami Bachi to follow along for a few more volumes.  I just hope that Lag grows on me as much as Gauche did.

Grade: B

Review copy provided by Viz