Kiseki moyuru Toki

Kiseki moyuru Toki (輝石燃ゆる時) is a one-shot by Tetsuo Hara (原哲夫), published in 1996 in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump. This short science-fiction story, whose title means "the moment the pyroxene ignites," is best known for having served as the seed for the manga Aterui II Sei, which Hara would develop four years later with novelist Katsuhiko Takahashi.

Synopsis

Japan, year 2027. The unbridled economic growth of past decades has deepened inequalities to an extreme degree, to the point where wealth now determines one's very status as a human being. The poorest, stripped of their rights, are confined outside the city in the "Blank District"; they are called the "Socialess," and polite society hunts them for sport without seeing the slightest problem in it.

In this hell, a vigilante known as "Hand" emerges, a young man of prodigious strength who turns the violence that hunters inflict on the weak back against them. In the midst of one of these confrontations, a strange light bursts forth, and a woman appears out of nowhere. A princess from a distant kingdom ravaged by the same evil, she was projected into this world by a sword with a will of its own. Hand takes her in, and together they discover that their two worlds, however different, suffer from one and the same disease.

The seed of Aterui II Sei

Kiseki moyuru Toki holds a special place in Tetsuo Hara's bibliography. This one-shot published in the Weekly Shonen Jump in 1996 directly foreshadows Aterui II Sei. In it, in sketch form, one can find the motifs that Hara would amplify in the 2000 volume with Katsuhiko Takahashi, depicting an evil that spans worlds and eras, a legendary object endowed with a will of its own, and a humanity on the brink of the abyss. As such, the story was later republished as a bonus in the GOTTA Comics edition of Aterui II Sei, as if to underscore the lineage between the two works.

A social and desperate fable

Beneath its action narrative exterior, Kiseki moyuru Toki is above all a biting social satire. Hara imagines a society where the poor are dehumanized to the point of serving as prey, and even as raw material for the medicine of the wealthy. Cruelty is normalized even among children, who are taught that the outcasts are not human beings. Faced with this darkness, the hero opposes only one thing: a will to never give up and to set the world right through the strength of his fist, in a heroic gesture characteristic of the author. This indictment of indifference already foreshadows the satirical vein that would run through Aterui II Sei.