[Februaryuri 2024 rerun] Liar Satsuki Can See Death
(base post on Februaryuri here!)
(note that all that follows, unless mentioned explicitly or in the rerun section, was written in February 2024)
Liar Satsuki Can See Death (Usotsuki Satsuki wa Shi ga Mieru), by Ryouko
Publication
Ended (9 volumes)
Unpublished in English (fan-translation readable here or here)
Unpublished in French
Summary
Satsuki from the class next door is a fucking liar. She acts super weird and spends her time creeping everyone out by telling them they're gonna die today. She's annoying and scary and gross and she keeps talking about absurd death circumstances and no one ever dies. Liar Satsuki. She's the worst.
This is what everyone thinks of Satsuki in her high school.
Except Satsuki is right. For years now, she's been seeing premonitory corpses 24 hours before a person's death. For years now, she's been preventing these to actually happen by all the ways she could. For years now, she's been twisting fate.
For years, she hasn't let a single person around her die if she could prevent it.
And she
is not
gonna start now.
There is, however, one little problem: Satsuki can't lie. She just can't. She's incapable of sugarcoating her death warnings.
No one listens to her, and she's learned to figure out everything by herself.
Yet, slowly, she earns the trust of a few students she saves, and gathers around her a ragtag team of weirdos to help her in her death-defying plans.
But who knows until when she can keep twisting fate before it breaks...?
CW (heavy, though it goes with the genre)
-
Main warning: death all around, sometimes gorey, in a slightly over-the-top way, and treated as murder mysteries would. It is, however, sometimes heavy in tone in spite of some plain fun moments. The first few chapters set the tone well.
I cannot reasonably list every other death circumstance that appears, but some main CW include:
- Mild trauma due to the death of a loved one
- Child abuse (physical and psychological; overall the parent figures are trash)
- Hardcore bullying as a common thread of a lot of stuff, and ambiguously befriended bullies
- Suicide attempts in something like three arcs
- One character in one arc is an obsessed crazy lesbian trope, featuring a bit of torture, it's ugh and unaddressed
- Characters with some extreme moral compass and one-dimensional reasoning
- Some very light fanservicey shots on legs, occasionally (YMMV)
- A big pile of accidental deaths of all sorts (electrocution, drowning, allergic reaction, etc)
Sexual elements?
None.Comment
This manga is on the subtextual side of yuri: it is, first and foremost, an over-the-top series of murder mysteries with a slight supernatural element. I think how hooked I am can be felt in the little summary I wrote above - writing it was a joy, and I'm really happy about it. Liar Satsuki's core concept is simply fantastic.
However...
Well, the manga has big, almost constant yuri vibes; but it's not the goal to address them - at least, don't get your hopes up about that. Get them down a notch, even: the only canon, textually confirmed gayness we got this far is one arc around chapter 20 with a crazy obsessed lesbian trope character who tortures her nonconsenting, one-sided love interest for kicks. It's one arc and there are a lot, but still: big, big yuk. I've reread that part for the purpose of this essay and I'm a bit surprised that I didn't drop my read then. It may be telling how much I was engrossed in the rest of it to somehow swallow that (one-time) moment, but you may very rightfully not be, and I haven't exactly forgiven this series for that - hence this warning.
And yet. And yet! This manga is on my list.
Indeed, in spite of its flaws, it's truly endearing most of the time. First because some scenes are still very gay-coded in cute ways - that doesn't change its blatant queerphobic trope1, but still. Second because we don't often get yuri that is genre fiction at least as much as it is yuri2: the crime-solving moments and plot twists are often genuinely good and interesting, and they really leave you wanting more. And third, because its protagonist is just great.
Satsuki is way too honest and sincere and nice for her own good. She's a badass, and an expert in piercing clues together, and she's desperate for friends and people who believe her. The way she looks at all the girls who are nice to her with starry eyes is wonderful. She's a genuine idealist, and she's extremely easy to root for as a protagonist. And she does read as a traumatized, neurodivergent, gay, reckless heroine. She's really great.
All the characters, overall, are over-the-top and intense. They have clear-cut visions of the world and their own more or less twisted set of moral rules, and it's really fun (in a terrible way) to see them interact with each other according to their clashing moral compasses. That being said, it also means that there is little room for nuanced discussions, and though the confrontations are funny on a per-chapter basis, they may feel a little simplistic on a larger scale.
Also, we're clearly approaching the end of the manga, which is finally unfolding the main supernatural mystery story arc that it set up in the first chapter. It's interesting so far, but I'm unsure about whether it'll completely stick the landing (see Extra (edit: and Rerun Section!)).
With all this being said, there's still something that inevitably draws me to this manga, that makes me like it a lot in spite of its imperfections, really (and makes me wish for some kind of anime adaptation someday). Its premise is enthralling, its small-scale mysteries are great, several of its characters are fascinating in terrible ways, it's often genuinely funny in its character interactions in spite of the deaths and heavy topics all around, it gets moving at times, and I can't get enough of its protagonist trying to be best pals with everyone.
Extra
The same author did another manga, March to Death, that is both very close to and very far from Liar Satsuki: it's also about people dying all the time, but there they all actually die in very gore, horrible ways (and I don't recommend it unless you really want to read that). It's definitely not made to be funny at all. It's both very interesting as another point of view on similar themes; and absolutely not an easy read.
It's also notable for setting my expectations low for Liar Satsuki: indeed, March to Death features some subtext yuri that is never concretized; and its ending is disappointing regarding its main supernatural mystery.
That being said, I did enjoy the ride of Liar Satsuki much more, and I think I'll keep that with me however it ends. Satsuki and Akira should kiss though
Rerun section
Well, this manga ended since I wrote all of the above!! I kept it untouched for completeness' sake, but there is much more I could write now.
Not to spoil too much, let me just say that I really liked most of the last arc - some of the arcs along the way were rather messy, but the climax ties in well with several themes, and is very moving. It also leads to a extremely yuri-tinted ending (though not how I expected it), and some really sweet casual intimacy in the epilogue - even if it textually sticks to the word "friend". So this is nice.
That being said, the end regrettably sidelines some characters a bit... and is also guilty of having a simplistic and apparent "moral of the story" dispensed by a teacher, along the lines of "everyone deserves to live because you don't know who may be beneficial to humanity's survival in the grand evolutionary scheme of things", which is really, really not my cup of tea. I think there are many things wrong with this line of thinking, which clearly seems to be the author's own closing thoughts on the topic; and it did sour some of the picture for me.
If you're able to overlook its flaws, though, Liar Satsuki Can See Death remains an engrossing murder mysteries/thriller yuri-tinted manga, with some memorable main cast and a lovable protagonist you can't help but root for. It's been a messy, but often good ride, tense and funny in turns; and it clearly stands as its own thing in the yuri landscape.
As closure, let me put here a recommendation for the video game Ghost Trick if the core concept of Liar Satsuki appeals to you. I made a meme about it on cohost once, because I really think its over-the-top characters, its murder mystery vibes, and its focus on a protagonist twisting fate over and over by rewriting the death of many people, may be to your taste if you are looking for this kind of thing. It's excellent, and it remains to this day one of my favorite games ever.
That one aforementioned arc makes me gnash my teeth so much. It's so far the one instance where we get an unambiguously voiced romantic and sexual attraction, and it's this! Featuring torture is in and of itself in line with this manga's genre, and I get that the characters are all exaggerated... but there's a billion different ways this could've played out. So writing this, like this, as the single canon instance of sapphic attraction, feeds into so much predatory lesbian stuff!! And then the story tries to downplay the character's responsibility for her acts in very clunky ways... How can you expect me not to struggle with cognitive dissonance as I'm reading and enjoying the rest of this series? And when you add to this the manga's tendency to have tidbits of fanservicey shots of bare legs, of which I quickly get tired, it really tells how strongly the rest of it drew me in... So clearly I'm really into the premise here, and its good execution in so many chapters; but it does put me in an awkward position about recommending it. I'm honestly having a blast reading it as it's translated, and I'm usually super enthusiastic about it; but there is selective memory at play here or there, for sure.↩
It happens occasionally, though. Hi, Otherside Picnic, we'll talk about you soon! Also the old, flawed, fascinating Simoun among anime; other examples that yuri-fy subgenres of SF or fantasy would probably be Gundam The Witch from Mercury (that I have yet to watch) and, to some extent, stuff like Puella Magi Madoka Magica (but the gay reading is often inherent to the magical girl subgenre to begin with). edit: I must also add to this list another ongoing sci-fi yuri series, Twinstar Cyclone Runaway, either in manga or in novel form - I've been warming up to it, even moreso as the novel is getting fan-translated, and it's clearly building up to being something special.↩