is a Japanese science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 manga

Manga

Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...

 written and illustrated by Moto Hagio

Moto Hagio

is a manga artist born on May 12, 1949 in Ōmuta, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan, though she currently lives in Saitama Prefecture. She is considered a "founding mother" of modern shōjo manga, especially shōnen-ai. She is also a member of the Year 24 Group...

, and serialised in Petit Flower

Petit Flower

was a Japanese manga magazine published by Shogakukan. Founded in 1980 as a quarterly magazine, in 1981 it changed to bimonthly, then monthly from 1984 to 1988, when it again became bimonthly. The magazine became defunct in May 2002, and was relaunched as Flowers in April 2004...

between 1985 and 1987. It is a gender-reversed take on science fiction stories that Hagio had read where men disappeared, leaving an all-female world.

Plot

The Earth has suffered a biological disaster, and by the year 2999, the Earth has become a wasteland. There is only one woman on the planet, revered as "Mother", who gives birth to all the boys of Earth, and is herself reborn like a phoenix. Prior to the beginning of the story, the amount of children from Mother has been decreasing, leading to anxiety among the men. At the beginning of the story, Mother is assassinated by a cult. The setting of the world has been described as "strongly reminiscent of Arab culture", "with horses and camels, swords and arrows, the world feels more medieval than futuristic." The men of Earth only live to about 30 years old due to "defective genetic traits" It is later discovered that Earth is an experiment run by humans who live on Mars, who have men and women, and that Mother is also a man who has his mind controlled and has had organ transplants. Mother is a ruse by the experimenters to camouflage the true source of the boys, they are genetically engineered on Mars.

Characters

• Kira (キラ) - an "eccentric" youth, who is discovered to be a genetically engineered hermaphrodite with extreme empathy
  Empathy
  Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion. The English word was coined in 1909 by E.B...
  
  , suitable for becoming the next Mother. He is referred to as a 'lost child,' by many in this world, and so he seems to be. He rarely speaks at first except to murmur broken historical facts of the past Earth, which are of course unfamiliar to the dwellers of Marginal. The boy refers to himself in the first person as 'Kira,' and is later found to be one of four identical hermaphrodites. The Marginal dwellers assume he is only a boy though.

• Grinja (グリンジャ) - the cultist who killed Mother. Though brutal when necessary, he's kind and gentle, and regrets the killings he chose to do. He rescues the mysterious boy Kira and only sells him because he fears that Kira will share his punishment for murdering the Mother. Even so, he stays with him and the boy's new owner, Ashijin. He and Ashijin become friends and comrades, but not for long. His tribe wear blue tattoos in the corner of their eyes. Matt Thorn describes Grinja as a 'straight man' to Kira's eccentric, and feels Grinja represents "death and grim resignation".

• Ashijin (アシジン) - A brash, confident, mysterious man, a lone dweller of the Moon Caves. Grinja originally sells the boy Kira to him for one sand cow. Later, the two rescue the boy from bandits and come to dwell together in the Moon Cave for a number of days. Ashijin is a loner, but a proud, self-assured one, obsessed with his own supposed immortality. Despite his courtesy and easy goodwill, this supposed 'cursed man' has a dark side. His jealousy drives him to self-righteous cruelty and violent temper toward those who betray him. Matt Thorn feels that Ashijin is a 'straight man' to Kira's eccentric, Ashijin representing "life and hope". Ebihara describes him as "the only optimistic relief" in the series.

• Meyard (メイヤード) - an employee of the Company that oversees Earth. Has a "cursed gene" and is forbidden to reproduce, and takes medicine to suppress this gene that has made his body feminine. According to Ebihara, Meyard is not as repellant to Hagio as his analogue in Star Red, Paveman, is.

• Ivan (イワン) - a "scientific genius from Mars" who created Kira. He is a genius but highly unstable. Ebihara describes him as an "adult child". When he was young, his father left his mother for another woman, then tried to return to Ivan's mother. She refused, and then Ivan's father knocked her unconscious and raped her. She committed suicide "half a year later". When grown, Ivan wanted to create "happy children", by giving them powerful empathic abilities - Kira is the result of this wish.

Manga

Serialised in Petit Flower between August 1985 and October 1987, Marginal was collected and released by Shogakukan as a series of five volumes from 1986 - 1987. Marginal was reprinted twice in 1994 and 1999 in three-volume editions.

Stage production

In 2008, Marginal was staged by Studio Life, an all-male theatre troupe which had previously staged Hagio's Thomas no Shinzō twice.

Reception

Matt Thorn

Matt Thorn

Matt Thorn is a cultural anthropologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Manga Production at Kyoto Seika University's Faculty of Manga in Japan. He is most well known in North America for his work dealing with shōjo manga. He has appeared at multiple anime conventions, including...

 has described the manga as "simply the best shojo sci-fi manga ever". Midori Matsui regards Marginal as a negative Thomas no Shinzou, which deconstructs the logocentrism

Logocentrism

Logocentrism is a term coined by German philosopher Ludwig Klages in the 1920s. It refers to the tradition of "Western" science and philosophy that situates the logos, ‘the word’ or the ‘act of speech’, as epistemologically superior in a system, or structure, in which we may only know, or be...

 and idealism

Idealism

In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...

Matsui detects in that work.