Wet Moon - Vol. 3 Ch. 29

[MangaDex]

 

[BTRNDL]

Thank you so much for bringing this to completion.

 

[xcel30]

Man i really am not made to read noir stuff, it always end and i just go "i dun get it"

 

[Baylord]

thanks for your service

 

[Doomroar]

So he finally found her after being on a killing spree, but he is no longer a cop he can't really arrest her, so he did it all just to feed his own ego?
Was Tamayama just an astronomer? what about the secret group trying to sabotage Jaxa? what about the file detailing the corruption within the police force?

This one flew over my head to the point that it left me thinking that 80% of the story was a delirious trip the MC had thanks to that piece on his head.

 

[77BLc9JwJGpLVARkamJx]

He turned into the big bad and finally cant wait to wring her life out again?

 

[Snakeykid1]

what was all the stuff about time travel? fuck. It better not have been just a dream

 

[Sokolar]

Suggested listening: "Sleeping Satellite" by Tasmin Archer

 

[Thjgthgt]

Thank you for translating!

Rereading immediately

 

[akuma_heart1]

That was great but I am still left with questions. I need to reread the entire thing.
Thank you Bernd-Scans!

 

[ALOC]

That's amazing

 

[BaSian]

Even after re-reading I'm confused. I was happy to chalk up Tamayama's appearance to be just Sata's delusion, the problem is, as far as we know, Sata only met with them at the end, unless the end wasn't the end and was before Sata raped Kiwako.

This would explain Tamayam's appearance (it's also important to note, that when Sata met Tamayama it was in an abandoned building, but somehow he left despite being the middle of the day, additionally just after Sata left it was shown that the building wasn't abandoned and had people inside, so it was clearly his delusion). This also explains why kiwako isn't burnt like she was shown to be.

The problem I have with this, is that in his way there we see how both the police and the yakuza get finished off, done by either Tamayama or Mori having gone crazy, unless that was supposed to be the real ending, while what followed happened before, but this would mean we don't actually know what happened to Sata in the end.

And another problem is that even if I can buy that Tamayama is just on Sata's mind, it doesn't explain Kiwako's actioins with seeing him (assuming that can be trusted) and how she took the metal (which I think can be trusted).

I think that the ants somewhat symbolize escapism, wee see them on Mori as he seems to feel remorse after killing Komatsu (his stomach cramps started after his murder as well), so when Sata is tied to the bed being raped and he sees the door open and a swamp of ants coming might him running away from the fact he killed the dancer. Additionally, although it wasn't said his father committed suicide when his mom ran away, ad some point relatively close to the end we get to see a panel covered in ants with kid Sata crying, and an adult hanging which I presume is his dad after Sata's mom ran away.

One thing that isn't clear is how Sata and Kiwako were found together after the rape. The way Sata remembered the encounter was that the encounter was at least semi-consensual, then Kiwako lifts the ax (which to be fair he shouldn't be able to know) and lightning strikes, which would lodge the metal in his skull, but doesn't explain how they both were found separately. The only thing I can think of is that after rape-choking Kiwako, Sata took the metal and left, because several lightnings happened that day it's possible they both were hit by separate lightnings.

 

[helloflyingrobot]

More than its in many ways similar predecessor Soil, Wet Moon feels much more conceptually honed—and, eight volumes fewer in length, its mysteries also promise to be much more manageable to "solve" if you really (though I still mean really) set your mind to it. I picked this up and read it quite passively while on vacation, so I won't be starting that journey today, or any time soon. But if I had to offer any pointers on where to start outside of the text itself, I'd say look into the literature of/on paranoia more broadly, not least its Cold War manifestations. Unlike some of Kaneko's other fare (e.g. Bambi and Her Pink Gun), Soil and Wet Moon aren't merely genre romps; they incline me to name Kankeo a foremost portraitist of paranoid psychosis/contagion.

Perhaps a better place to start for manga/anime fans, however, is Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress, which is also centrally concerned with slippages in memory. Wet Moon's ending, where the chase for Kiwako continues, reminds us of the film's, whose heroine, having spent a lifetime tracking her beloved, declares that more than the actual object of her desire, "it's the chase I truly love". That she declares this in the visual context of a space voyage actually makes me wonder if Kon's film constituted one of Kaneko's direct inspirations (both as mangaka also have a certain amount of overlap in artistic sensibility). But where these texts stop paralleling each other is also where things get interesting: notably, Kon inverts the traditional genders of chaser and chased and, if memory serves, his heroine is last seen departing the moon, rather than striving toward it. And of the chases, only Sata's seems flat-out pathological. Historically, both paranoia (as it animates fictional agent-intellectuals) and the moon (as a symbol of fertility/pregnancy) have been heavily gendered masculine and feminine respectively, so that's one angle to take with pairing these texts that might sharpen the distinct but related themes of both.

 

[JonRa]

Open ending as expected... oh well, that was cute.

 

[NestorSonOfNeleus]

Thanks for translating!

I don't know how much of the plot can you force to make sense even on further rereads. I think some elements are too deranged to make any logical sense, even if you're irrational.

 

[Myamoto_Usagi]

please someone explain