For some reason I’d been skimping on my manga lately. I haven’t read Air Gear in a while, Noritaka keeps falling off my radar, Gantz was never really able to hold my attention, and I haven’t even been keeping up with Otogi no Machi no Rena’s slow release schedule. The other day while trolling through 4chan’s /a/ board, though, I stumbled upon Mirai Nikki, a suspense / action title with an interesting concept and what looks like rather sporadic fan translations.

Mirai Nikki means “future diary” and is about a socially-inept high school student named Yukiteru Amano, who obsessively records everything he sees into a diary-like log on his cellphone. When one of his imaginary friends (for he has no real friends) decides to play a new game with him, things get interesting. His diary starts writing itself, and shows him the future. This is all well and good until this phone tells him that a serial killer is going to murder him.

Happily, Mirai Nikki doesn’t fall into the age-old Sci-fi trap of time paradoxes and such, allowing our protagonist to influence his own future. After escaping near-certain doom, Yuki discovers that eleven other people were given the ability to see into the future as well, and over the next ninety days or so they are to hunt each other down. The last person standing will inherit the title of Yuki’s imaginary friend, who just happens to be the god of space and time.

The main character falls squarely in the downtrodden-everyman category that has become so hackneyed in Japanese fiction, but five chapters into this story I’m really quite excited to see where all of this is heading. Due to the clearly limited scope of the premise (twelve competitors, three months), I’m optimistic that the plot won’t spin itself completely out of control like so many other manga I’ve had to give up over the years.