finished reading I am a Hero and thought it was a pretty good zombie story. Bonus chapter/new ending is required though because the original ending is kinda shit. It has one of the more interesting takes on “what happens after the zombies” that I’ve seen, because logically zombies would stop being an issue if you just wait until they rot to the point of being immobile, so you just have to find somewhere safe to hide for a few months. The zombies themselves just being a precursor for skyscraper-sized flesh-golem hive minds, implied to be the result of aliens is an explanation you don’t really see in zombie fiction.
I think really my main issue with it is that it follows too many different groups, where it feels like you can go a whole volume without seeing the main characters, which can make the narrative a bit difficult to keep track of as you try to remember where a group last left off. I think the most interesting thing is how it highlights the massive cultural differences between Japan and America. The most obvious being that the MC is the only character who has a real gun (he just so happened to be heading to the gun club for target practice when shit goes down), but everybody is also afraid of being prosecuted for theft and other crimes after the zombie plague ends; at first I thought it was just the MC being particularly neurotic but literally everyone seems to be concerned with this, either hiding their identities or leaving apology notes when they ransack an abandoned house or store including their name and contact information so that the (most likely dead or zombified) owners can contact them for restitution when it’s all over. In fact it’s presented as important character development when the main character stops giving a shit about the rules. I just thought it was interesting how these cultural differences affect the story, and I wonder if Japanese audiences feel the same when watching Western zombie fiction.
