~~ SPOILERS warning ~~
Starts off with more details about Legoshi’s mother. How much she had isolated herself, when her body showed signs of her mixed parentage. Gosha and Yahya fight again- over the same rift between them: that Gosha chose to focus on his family, while Yahya wants his old teammate for their vigilante crusade. Legoshi walks out of the hospital even though not fully recovered, and engages in some full-moonlight bathing on Deep Night (is this a cultural Japanese thing, or made up for this world? I don’t know) Yahya confronts him there about letting Melon escape. Juno is still after Louis- constantly drawn to him in spite of always getting rebuffed, but now he tells her that he’s engaged- a marriage arranged when he was much younger. Juno runs to Legoshi with her tears (and his neighbors speculate she’s yet another girlfriend). We learn that the animal society puts even more pressure on same-species couples to marry, to keep any from becoming genetically diluted or going extinct. Juno tries to defy this mindset very publicly. Then a backstory on the mice (or rats?) that serve Yahya. (I found this chapter completely uninteresting). We get more inside Melon’s head and learn how unbalanced he really is. Legoshi is on the verge of tracking him down. And there is a really disturbing tattoo parlor scene (with lots of blood) with an old sloth tattoo artist whose applications are torture. But still sought after for some reason. Curiously, his responses are so slow that he replies to all the parts of a conversation after the other person has long moved on (even left the room). Legoshi tries to exploit this. But he runs afoul of the lion gang and is almost done in- saved at the very last minute by something the seal Sagwan had taught him.
In the after pages we learn that the manga artist draws everything by hand- even all the backgrounds and shading tones are painstakingly inked in. I was super impressed. So much respect for the dedication and work that goes into that.
Borrowed from the public library. Completed on 4/18/24.
