Based on a play, the manga is a Japanese horror manga, written and illustrated by Usamaru Furuya. It was adapted from a play originally written and performed by the Tokyo Grand Guignol theatre troupe in 1986. The original writer of the play, Norimizu Ameya, played the part of Jaibo and thus became the character’s namesake..
Litchi Hikari Club also know as Lychee Light Club was published in English as Lychee Light Club by Vertical Inc. on April 26, 2011. This Ero-Guro /seinen manga that revolves around a group of nine schoolboys who plan to create the ultimate in Artificial Intelligence. For the sooty industrial town’s lads there’s only one point of light: the Light Club, a secret brotherhood they’ve organized in an abandoned factory.
The attractive leader of the club, Zera, is a twisted man polluting the minds of the club members to make them do whatever he pleases. Tamiya, the original founder of the club, wants to reclaim the club. Niko, the second in command, is pissed off at Jaibo, the one obsessed with Zera. They kidnap a schoolgirl, but the AI Raichi falls in love with her and she with him, and things get messy. They’re on the verge of booting up their crowning achievement, a “thinking machine” fueled by lychee fruits. At the same time, the middle schoolers’ cooties-fearing solidarity is devolving into a downright National Socialist muck of murderous paranoia, perverse aestheticism, and (not always) suppressed homosexuality and as the story progresses, we watch the group gradually fall apart due to internal conflict and as the boys, under corrupt leadership, involve increasingly more twisted and depraved methods to reach their goal.
Furuya Usamaru made the action to take place in a world where the Japanese and the Nazis have won the Second World War, even if it doesn’t play a very important role in the action, it always made me thaught how affected the Japanaese were by their defeat and how close their way of thinking is close to the Germans. Furuya Usamaru is the same author who wrote the troubling Suicide Club (Jisatsu Circle) who was later on made a succesfull and equally troubling movie by Sion Sono as young students, subliminally influenced by apparently teen pop artists bands into a trend of comitting group suicide…
Loud Alien Noize 