Satoshi Mizukami has weathered a long and circuitous road on his way to western acclaim. Though his Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer has long been lauded as a unique, ambitious, and heartfelt twist on the shonen formula, it only received an official translation long after its release, and never received an anime adaptation. Most recently, his Planet With demonstrated both the power and limitations of translating Mizukami’s work to animation, but without that translating into anything approaching wide appeal (in spite of my best efforts). And nestled between those two works, we find the brief, beautiful, and utterly characteristic Spirit Circle.

Spirit Circle’s premise unfolds rapidly across the course of its first volume. We are first introduced to Fuuta Okeya, a middle school student mundane in all ways except for his affinity for ghosts. Fuuta soon meets a new transfer student, Kouko Ishigami – but before he can even really introduce himself, this strange girl announces that she’s planning to kill him. Though Fuuta protests that they don’t even know each other, Kouko claims they have met many times before. While this may be the first meeting of Fuuta Okeya and Kouko Ishigami, these two figures have crossed paths again and again throughout history, here incarnated as an oracle and the man who attacks her, there taking form as a chivalrous knight and the witch he slays. The two are bound together on a wheel of reincarnation, and once Kouko has forced Fuuta to remember all of their past lives, she intends to destroy him once and for all.

Spirit Circle’s premise is extremely Mizukami, and his touch is equally apparent in all of this manga’s smaller choices. Fuuta’s “servant” Rune contains echoes of Planet With’s Ginko and Biscuit Hammer’s princess, while the constant contrasting of mundane dialogue and supernatural devices seems characteristic of all his work. Mizukami tonally conveys his absurd, fantastical touches with the same deadpan steadiness he conveys all of his drama, undercutting any sense of wonder in order to make the audience quickly take all of his drama at face value. And that ear for deadpan delivery carries through into his overt comedy, merging naturally with his great talent for everyday banter. All of Mizukami’s stories essentially feel like “off hours fantasy” – like fantasy is something its characters experience in between shifts at their day job, and thus they’re normally dressed like they’re going somewhere else after this.

Equally apparent throughout Spirit Circle is Mizukami’s tremendous gift for dramatic paneling. Mizukami’s actual art style is relatively simplistic and a little dated; even his comedy often feels lifted from shows of fifteen or twenty years ago. But when it comes to paneling specifically, Mizukami has a terrific eye for managing the reader’s emotional experience across the page. Check out how the cramped, stacked panels on the right of this page create a sense of bustling distraction, only for both Fuuta and the audience to exhale in relief as the day ends on a long, lazy vertical panel. See how Fuuta’s sense of increasing disorientation as he’s knocked down the steps come through clearly in the blocking and framing of these pages, as we tumble downwards with him. Whether it’s major dramatic shifts or tiny comic beats, Mizukami’s understanding of paneling and storytelling economy is clear all throughout Spirit Circle.

Speaking of narrative economy, Spirit Circle also demonstrates Mizukami’s almost supernatural gift for efficient characterization. All of the Mizukami works I’ve experienced possess ensemble casts that seem far too large for the amount of story they’re telling, and yet he always manages to make each character come across as sympathetic and alive. His combination of mundane yet very funny incidental conversations and brutally poignant character motivations result in casts it’s impossible not to fall in love with; and here in Spirit Circle, he makes you fall in love with them again and again, only to smash your heart to pieces. Foregoing the standard ensemble cast of Biscuit Hammer or Planet With, Spirit Circle’s reincarnation-centered narrative means both Fuuta and Kouko are ensembles all by themselves. And though I’m only one volume in, their choral voice is sounding a melody that’s already breaking my heart.

The idea of reincarnation isn’t a new obsession for Mizukami. Biscuit Hammer centered itself on a battle that had apparently been recurring throughout history, and Planet With posited that the “dragon” of humanity’s violent potential could reincarnate in any human soul. Reincarnation, along with the idea of humans having specific “destined” roles, pops up throughout Mizukami’s stories, always presenting a sense of tension as to what is predetermined, and what we ourselves can do to change our world. Human choices become all the more desperate for their prophetic implications; we are not just fighting the world as it is, we are fighting forces of cyclical violence that have existed for all time. Mizukami’s characters seem to appreciate the inevitability and potential futility of their struggles; their vitality shines all the brighter for their acknowledgment that they are small and vulnerable, locked in a battle against human nature itself.

In this world of inevitable, cyclical human tragedy, Mizukami offers the same answer he has always preached: forgiveness. In Planet With, violence beget violence until nearly all of creation was destroyed, only for salvation to come through one radical act of personal forgiveness. In the midst of that story’s civilization-scale butchery, it maintained that “it is a far greater thing to see the cruelty of the world and remain kind than to be strong.” All the hate the world offered could only be answered with love, for what other answer could there be? Having endured the death of his very species and fought hard to preserve his new family, its protagonist could ultimately look up at his friends with joy in his eyes, and declare “change your perspective with love and behold, the universe is full of blessings.” Even the pursuit of justice, if turned towards revenge, became a joyless affair. What good is justice if our justice leads us to mutual destruction?

Spirit Circle’s overarching premise essentially posits a war between two potential views of the past, and of our own natures. Scarred by lifetime after lifetime of abuse at Fuuta’s hands, Shouko believes we must be held accountable for our past crimes, and that reincarnation in a new body is no escape from your true nature. Wiping the slate clean is both a cowardly escape and a denial of the past, an injustice committed against all who have suffered before. Bewildered by her animosity but willing to learn, Fuuta emphatically declares that he still wants to be friends with her, and that if that requires coming to terms with his past selves, he’ll accept it. Though even his own former selves rebel against the idea of peace, he feels certain that simply being his best self in this life is good enough. How else could he think?

By framing the idea of forgiveness in the context of reincarnation, Spirit Circle initially makes Fuuta’s position feel entirely defensible. How could he possibly be responsible for the crimes of other people who just so happen to share his soul? But Spirit Circle soon complicates this view, spending the whole second half of this volume on just one of Fuuta’s past lives. In that life, Fuuta was the proud young knight Vann, heir to his family name and eager to prove himself. Still not much older than a boy, Vann is soon tasked with killing a local witch; but when he fails to swiftly kill his target, she brands him with a curse for all of time. Cast out by his family, Vann eventually falls into a life of aimless drunken rambling, living with a former assassin and a wayward priest until each of them expire in turn. Then, having finished yet another life, Vann is ultimately forced to raise a young child. After a series of lives that take him from diligent knight to cold-blooded murderer to drunken wreck to beloved father, Vann eventually dies, the sum of all the lives he has ever lived.

Given the context of that narrative, it is clear that “reincarnation” in Spirit Circle implies more than genuine supernatural cycles. Each of us find ourselves reincarnated every new day, assigned our past days and tasked with doing our best with a new one. Each day we have a chance to reinvent ourselves, and over the course of a long and colorful life, each of us will live through phases we’re proud of and phases we scorn, long lows and shimmering highs, shameful regrets and moments of selfless character. The knight that is young Vann reincarnates himself several times over, and though his later lives don’t erase his past crimes, Vann is far more than his worst actions. He was the ignorant killer depriving a village of their medicine, and he was also the old and enfeebled man, only regretting that he couldn’t ensure his daughter a future.

Mizukami is clearly an idealist, though he does recognize that forgiveness can be an incredibly difficult task. Planet With essentially centered its final act around the power and difficulty of forgiveness, and in Biscuit Hammer, the hero’s realization that he won’t forgive his oppressors is actually a great source of strength. Here too, the specter of pain and resentment hangs over Spirit Circle’s pages, and the brutality of its violence emphasizes that what is being asked here is no small thing. Spirit Circle understands that Kouko is being asked to forgive the unforgivable, and its answer may just be the pragmatic “what other choice do we have?”

What can we do, but forgive? Kouko holds Fuuta’s crimes against her close, but her anger seems to bring her no joy. She is right, but what of it? Even the knight Vann resented the witch he killed for many years, blaming her for the joylessness of his current life. But after new deaths left him bereft of even that small life, his salvation arrived in the form of a new daughter to care for, and a new life to lead. By merely looking over our shoulder and lamenting the path of our journey, we miss out on the opportunity to find new peace. Though the cycle of reincarnation may damn us to relive old wounds again and again, it also offers the potential of rebirth.

Even the fact that his new daughter has a face drawn from his old lives seems to echo the inescapable, cyclical nature of our own lives. We might not actually see the same faces again and again throughout our lives, but we will certainly create new relationships that echo the old, and find ourselves once again at crossroads in how we engage with others. We cannot forget our past crimes, but we can use our old experiences to ensure that when we cycle around again, we are a little kinder, a little more accommodating, a little more understanding of our shared grief. The faces we have wronged will stay with us, but we can commit to reincarnating as better selves, and carrying that commitment on to the lives we touch.

Idealist though he may be, Mizukami is not a fool. Throughout Spirit Circle’s first volume, it is made abundantly clear that what tethers us is no supernatural force of violence – it is us and us alone. In both of Fuuta’s past lives so far, man-made religions emphatically demonstrated our cruelty to our fellow man, and how our searches for meaning and safety often amount to no more than superstitious violence. We want to believe there is more than the soil, more than the sky, more than the blood we shed and the brief time we share. We wish it so badly, and in our rage and fear and grief, we fulfill the painful cycles which are themselves the only certainty, the only god we’ll ever know.

But ultimately, that cold truth can be its own form of comfort. We cannot escape our cycles, cannot break from the constant demands the world asks of us, or even our past failures. All we can hope for is to live out a happier, kinder story this time, and forgive the wrongs that have been done to us. To hold our own misdeeds in one hand, and as we accept them, let the wrongs we’ve carried with us settle in the past. Let our past pain be a soil for growth, not a barren reminder of all that we’ve lost. The cycle is unending, but it is ours to decide whether it is a cycle of revenge, or renewal.

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