Books: MPD Psycho Vol. 2

The second volume of MPD-Psycho does one thing right and another thing (still) somewhat wrong. On the good side, it tones down the often-gratuitous helpings of pathologically explicit gore that justified Dark Horse jacketing this gruesome little item in shrinkwrap and slapping an “18+” sticker on it. This time around, apart from a few sudden spurts of gore — including one thoroughly nasty scene where a girl throws herself off an apartment balcony and skewers herself on an electric pole — the book’s almost PG-13 rated all the way through.

On the bad side, we still get a story that milks multiple personality disorder (the MPD of the title) as shamelessly as it can for plot twists. Detective Kazuhiko Amamiya (originally “Yosuke Kobayashi”) has at least one sociopathic, don’t-give-a-damn alternate persona lurking inside that hide of his, Shinji Nishizono — and it has a horrible tendency to ooze on out when he’s confronted with someone else equally or even more sick (which happens with immense regularity). Fine, except that series author Eiji Otsuka isn’t content to just let him wrestle with one inner demon, or two, or even three. Amamiya’s three-way personality gains a fourth facet, “Kiyoshi Murata,” and by the end of the book we feel like the poor guy’s gone from being the closest thing to the story’s protagonist to becoming a veritable psychological clown car. I’m half-tempted to run a betting pool to see how many alters he ends up with by the time we get to the last book.

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