After School Nightmare


After School Nightmare is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Setona Mizushiro. It was serialized from 2004 to 2007 in the manga magazine Princess and collected in ten volumes. It was licensed in North America by Go! Comi, with all volumes adapted by Mallory Reaves and edited by Brynne Chandler. The story is about Mashiro Ichijo, an intersex high-school student who is forced by a teacher to work out their gender identity in a collective dream, and Mashiro's romantic relationships with two classmates, one female and one male.

Plot

Mashiro Ichijo is a girls' idol, handsome and kind, but he has been hiding a secret all his life; he's not truly male, nor entirely female. He has the upper body of a male but the lower body of a female. When a mysterious school nurse introduces him to a new class, he finds that in order to graduate he has to go to a world of dreams to find a mysterious key, competing with other classmates to find it. Once this key is found, the student graduates and all other members of the school forget the finder's existence. As he struggles with his gender identity, he tries to decide whether he wants to live as a male and go out with one of the prettiest girls in school or as a female and be with the cute male slacker, both of whom are madly in love with Ichijo.
The final chapter reveals that the whole story is an allegory for an outer story that was hinted at on the first page and then hinted at repeatedly during the course of the story: The school is connected with a ward of pregnant women and when a student graduates, they are born in the real world. Mashiro is reborn as a girl, whose twin brother died right before birth. In the epilogue, the real-world outcome for Kureha Fujishima, Ai Mizuhashi, and Ebizawa are shown – dead. The story ends with the real-world Mashiro and Sou Mizuhashi meeting by coincidence when catching the same train to school.

Characters

All of the main and secondary characters take part in the dream class at some point during the story.

Main characters

; Mashiro Ichijo
; Kureha Fujishima
; Sou Mizuhashi
; Ai Mizuhashi

Secondary characters

; Nurse
; Midori Okui
; Itsuki Shinonome
; Kazuyuki Shinbashi
; Asuka Suo
; Momoka Ohara
; Koichiro Kurosaki
; Ebizawa
;Sumida

Development

According to Mizushiro, the story was originally conceived as science fiction, set on board a space-ship. When she began to develop it as a manga, she moved the setting to a high school, changing the sleeping pods the characters used for shared dreaming into canopied beds. The characters Itsuki Shinonome and Asuka Suo were supposed to be part of the initial class of dreamers with Mashiro, but after serialization was announced in Princess as a horror story, Mizushiro put off introducing them because she thought their dream forms of a giraffe and mermaid were too gentle for an atmosphere of horror.

Release

After School Nightmare was written and illustrated by Setona Mizushiro. It was serialized in the monthly manga magazine Princess, beginning in the July 2004 issue, released on 5 June 2004, and concluding in the December 2007 issue, released on 6 November 2007. The 39 untitled chapters were collected in ten volumes by Akita Shoten under the Princess Comics imprint. It was licensed to be adapted into English in North America by Go! Comi, with all volumes published before the imprint shut down in 2010. It is also licensed in France by Asuka, in Italy by Star Comics, and in Germany by Carlsen Verlag.

Reception

In 2007, After School Nightmare was nominated for an Eisner Award in the category "Best U.S. Edition of International Material – Japan". The English edition of After School Nightmare was named by the Young Adult Library Services Association as among the 10 best graphic novels for teens for 2008.