Freesia is a weird and surreal psychological action manga by Jiro Matsumoto following mostly the adventures of a mentally insane legally sanctioned bespectacled vengeance killer called Kano. The manga is fairly violent and has scenes that can range from disturbing to disgusting so it is definitely not for everyone, but those with some tolerance and the stomach for it will definitely find an enjoyable dark story here.

Premise: Freesia is set in an alternate history Japan where people are legally obliged to avenge the death of their loved ones if another person kills them, and seeing that trying to kill another person would be a highly dangerous thing for the average person to do, the majority of people opt to instead hire professionals who deal in revenge killings and enacting vengeance on the behalf of their client as proxies. The story basically centers around one such agency that is in the business of revenge killing people and follows several characters who work there. The premise is actually pretty interesting already on its own, but it is just surface level compared to the actual meat of the manga, that being its characters and the things they undergo throughout the course of story.

Story: The manga in the beginning follows a series of revenge killings that are carried out by our main characters, and as expected things start out fairly simple but they escalate with each new mission. These tasks are narratively really just excuses to have our characters go through increasingly traumatic experiences and have said experiences mold and change our characters, with all of the sanctioned killers ending up in a different direction in response to said traumas. Saying anything more of Freesia’s story would be spoiler material in my opinion, but I shall mention that it gets weirder and more surreal the longer it goes on and at some point it will abandon all sense of normalcy as if the manga and the story were seemingly breaking down along with the deteriorating mental health of our characters, and you will be left with an ending that will have you questioning what was even real in the manga.

Characters: Freesia at its core is a psychological manga so the primary focus is naturally on the characters, the story easily comes second in this case as it really is just a vessel for the manga to do it characters exploration. If you are the kind of voyeuristic sadist who enjoys watching broken and miserable characters wail around in life then you will feel right at home, because Freesia will provide exactly that. There are a number of characters all with their complexes and issues, but for the sake of brevity and for the sake of avoiding as much spoilers as possible I will only talk of Kano, the primary protagonist.

Kano is one of those rare characters that make it worth recommending their story just for them alone, he is easily the best part of Freesia and is also one of the most entertaining portrayals of an insane person I’ve seen. From the start of the story he is already very obviously mentally ill to the reader, but he is still functional enough to just get by in his daily life without being seen as such by the other characters, who instead view him as a mild mannered kind of guy that they wouldn’t think twice of after bumping onto him on the street, while his co-workers don’t take him seriously as a vengeance killer.

At his home we see just how dysfunctional he truly is as he often does not pay much attention to his vegetative state mother or the girlfriend he is living with, instead he is often concentrated at completely different things like the television or a phone that only he can hear and at one point in the story it goes so bad that the girlfriend cheats in front of him just to try and elicit a reaction from Kano. Even outside of his home and when seemingly functioning well in society it still never feels like he is operating on the same level as the other characters, his mind is always in his own world and he is just going through the motions of a normal conversation. This “being on another level” only escalates as the manga goes on and overtakes the story too as the other characters will quite literally become unable to even touch Kano and he transforms into a truly terrifying entity that cannot be understood.

Of course given that our protagonist is insane that is just one way of viewing the story and you can always bring in the unreliable narrator angle as the more the story focuses on Kano’s viewpoint the more unreal things get and if we take things at their face value then bullets really just pass through Kano as if he wasn’t even there when no other character display such seemingly magical abilities. It is entirely probable that we are seeing events as through how Kano imagines them rather than how they actually happen and there are several hints for this to be the case.

In any case, watching Kano’s progressive descent into even deeper layers of madness than what he had at the start is one of the most entertaining parts of Freesia and will no doubt fascinate readers whose interest it has managed to arouse.

Action: A significant portion of Freesia is compromised of action sequences and there is a lot of gunfighting and even some melee close quarters battles, and all of them are done pretty well. Jiro Matsumoto did a good job on making his fight scenes remain suspenseful and thrilling for most of the manga, even Kano was fairly vulnerable and suffered injuries at the earlier points of the story, The combat is also quite visceral and feels real with bullets often leaving the characters full of holes and even taking out entire chunks out of the injured bodies, though it never got to the point where I felt it was too much or too exaggerated to be taken seriously, so it was in good balance. Action sequences involving Kano were often filled with fits of insanity or delusion, which just made them even more entertaining.

Art: The manga’s art overall is not the best for sure, it is probably the category I can praise it the least amount for and it often looks a bit rough and uneven but it is kind of fitting for its story in a way, and there some moments in it where the art is chillingly good, these occur at some pivotal emotional moments in the story and do a really good job of drawing you into the moment and the feelings it wants to convey, but those only work as well as they do because the manga does not usually look that good in my opinion.

Conclusion: Freesia while it is definitely not for everyone it is one of the best Psychological action manga you can read with well done action sequences and interesting exploration of its characters and their psyche, because of this it deserves my strongest recommendation.