Pure Trance is a Shoujo Horror manga written and illustrated by Junko Mizuno, which was serialized from 1996 to 1998 in booklets accompanying Avex Track's Pure Trance techno compilation CDs and later compiled into a single volume. In this dreamy Science Fantasy, Junko Mizuno illustrates a story full of catfights, alien safari adventures, evil experiments, and a girl who dreams of becoming a pop idol singer.
Following the Third World War, humankind left the toxic surface of the Earth and built an underground city to survive. The underground citizens, no longer having meat, live on "Pure Trance", a life-sustaining Food Pill. A serious social problem has emerged in this new society: hyperorexia, or severe overeating, a side effect of the pill.
The story follows Kaori Suzuki, a nurse working at Overeaters Treatment Center 102, a hospital which has been ruined by tyrannical director Keiko Yamazaki and her mistreatment of her workers. Kaori tries to make it through her miserable job, eventually rebelling against the director and fleeing to see the surface.
Tropes in this manga include:
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: According to the notes in the manga these creatures have some strange colors.
- Ax-Crazy: The Director, on so many levels. Her thoughts on childcare? Turning a pair of twins into earrings, turning a really pretty girlchild into a stuffed doll and turning the last child into a cyborg maid.
- Bad Boss: Keiko mistreats literally everyone around her.
- Best Served Cold:Yuriko waited four long years and trained herself and Yuka diligently so that the moment Keiko was at their mercy they could kill her at their first opportunity. They succeeded.
- Birth-Death Juxtaposition: Keiko is killed just as Takeko and Umeko give birth to a pair of children (who look exactly like Keiko, as a matter of fact).
- Broken Ace: Keiko really is a skilled doctor.
- Crapsaccharine World: The artwork is extremely adorable but the storyline proves the world pretty much sucks.
- Creepy Twins: The twin nurses Takeko and Umeko but Keiko the hospital director from hell created them so that's no big surprise. Also Yuki and Miki, but they're the good kind of creepy.
- The Dog Bites Back: Towards the end of the story, every single one of the still other living nurses help Nurse Masako get Keiko arrested. They laugh and wave as the Director is dragged away.
- Dream Sequence: The Director has plenty of these, and they're pretty freaky.
- Dreaming of Things to Come: And the future doesn't look pretty.
- The Dutiful Son: Sugiura may be a dumbass that the Director has completely kowed but he still sends money to the country for his family.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: When Kaori, Yuriko, Rika, Miki and Yuki escape to the surface, no one expects to see them ever again. Nonetheless, Keiko sends assassins anyway.
- Fanservice: Tons of attractive, adult women walking around topless or in bra tops and lingerie! Sometimes it's plot-relevant, other times it's not.
- Food Pills: Normal food can't be grown in the underground, so food pills are created as a substitute.
- Food Porn: When real food is found again, everyone thinks it looks delicious.
- Gender Equals Breed: Yuka, the child of Rika, a human woman and a Brain Person, is a fairly humanoid Cute Monster Girl.
- Generation Xerox: Literally. Artificial humans, should they live long enough, eventually give birth regardless of conception. Takeko and Umeko give birth to two little girls that look EXACTLY like the Director.
- Girls Love Stuffed Animals: Kimiko really loves that Seiko plush doll. Also Keiko wanted to turn a living child into a stuffed doll.
- Grand Theft Me: Subverted since the twins are happily cohabitating in Yuriko-chan's body.
- Grotesque Cute: For a story with a fairly cutesy art style, Pure Trance is incredibly disturbing, what with all the eating disorders, murder, drug abuse, corporate corruption and odd fascination with porn.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Kiyomi so that Kaori and the kids can escape to the surface and later Yuki and Miki to empower Yuriko and raise Yuka.
- Improbably Female Cast: Neither of the recurring males matter in the grand scheme of things.
- Interspecies Romance: Rika and a Brain person, which spawns Yuka.
- Kick the Dog: Over the course of the manga, the Director personally kills 3 women, abuses her staff, patients and position and eats animals from the local zoo.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Kiyomi after her Heroic Sacrifice. Kajiwara eventually finds and repairs her, dubbing her B-ko.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Keiko gets hit HARD with this. She has dreams of someone killing her. The daughters of the women she spectacularly failed to save escape to the surface world along with one of the many nurses she's been abusing under her employ. She manages to recapture and murder the nurse which earns the wrath of the young girls the nurse had raised. Three of the girls die but not before one of them gives birth to a fifth girl and the twins give their powers and spirit to the fourth so she can raise the baby. While this is going on, Keiko has hired another nurse who, unfortunately for her, is not as easily intimidated. With the help of a surface animal, a long-term patient and the other nurses, the new nurse gets Keiko put in jail, where she finally meets her end when the surface girls pass by and put an arrow through her heart.
- Machiavelli Was Wrong: Remember kids, abuse does not improve employee morale!
- Magic Plastic Surgery: Considering how much she gets and how much drugs she takes, it's amazing how well Keiko looks.
- Mushroom Samba: Keiko takes so much Liquid Apple that she has actually NAMED her hallucinations, you guessed it, "Mr. Apple."
- Older Than They Look: NO ONE knows how old the Director actually is and she gets plastic surgery regularly.
- Rapid Aging: Yuka ages to an adult within four years.
- Supreme Chef: B-ko. She eventually writes a cookbook for all of the recipes she developed on the surface world.
- Team Mom: Nurse Kaori and Aiko. Also the manager of the Yasuragi bar, appropriately nicknamed "Mama."
- Took a Level in Badass: After escaping to the surface, Seiko re-emerges as a badass, eyepatch wearing Action Girl.
- Virtually everyone once they get away from the Director.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom:Seiko. There's no reason why she would know Kimiko and Kaori are enemies though.
- Walking Shirtless Scene: On several occasions, the Director, strippers and the surface girls.
- You Killed Our Surrogate Mother: Yuriko does not take Kaori's death sitting down.
