Left: Akogi-san; right: Tanya the crane; up: Uzuki Ritsu; upper left: a flock of flying salarymen
"If wishes could come true, what dreams would you live? This is a wonderland. A world where everything has changed, and nothing changes."
—Kodaira Kotarou, protagonist of the first chapter
One day, without warning, an alien spaceship crashlands in the ordinary city of Yumemigaoka. While the crash doesn’t make any victims and the alien promptly apologizes for the incovenience, it also causes some… changes around the world. People’s personal wishes start coming true and the laws of physics and logic become a lot more fleeting: trains start to fly, dinosaurs casually walk the streets, some people get superpowers or transform into all sorts of things while others remain normal… From there, we follow the stories of various characters caught up in all this weirdness.
Yumemigaoka Wonderland is a manga by Masuda Eiji, started in 2020 in the Bessatsu Shonen Champion. Set in the same universe as his other worksnote , the series (which is his first monthly publication) is this time written as an anthology with some recurring characters but mostly self-contained stories. While Masuda’s trademark rapid-fire comedy is still present, some of the stories can have surprisingly dark or disturbing twists, creating mixes of tone as strange as the series’ world itself.
The series is complete with 4 volumes.
Tropes:
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Unsurprisingly, some of the wishes come with unexpected side effects, such as the ability to fly being activated by farting (chapter 1), the ability to eat as much as one’s want leading to constant hunger (chapter 3), or the wish to erase your imperfect self leading to constantly erasing your own memory (chapter 8). It doesn’t help that those "wishes" can come true without the wisher being even aware of it.
- Big Eater: Uzuki Ritsu’s wish was to be able to "eat anything she likes as much as she likes". Her wish came true in the most literal sense possible, as she became able to eat literally anything.
- The Cameo: The early chapters are littered with background cameos (and even some talking ones) from Masuda’s previous series, strongly establishing that this one takes place in the same universe. Once that’s established though, they become few and far between.
- Taking it much further, chapter 14 brings back Akane from My Monster Secret as an active character in the narrative and has brief guest appearances from several other characters of that series. It is also, ironically, the chapter that marks the end of the "Wonderland" part of the series, with a brutal return to the "normal" reality.
- Dating Catwoman: Played With. The superhero protagonist of chapter 4 and 5 thought he was in such a relationship with his archnemesis the Black Princess, and was even about to propose to her, but found out that she was already dating someone else.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The second half of chapter 3, where Ritsu starts to mindlessly indulge in her appetite, has obvious parallels with sexual liberation, with some shots and reactions from both characters that almost wouldn’t feel out of place in a hentai.
- Doppelgänger: Chapter 12-13 are about Linaria, an up-and-coming idol who’s proud to be successful without "cheating" with a wish like many of her peers. Until she meets with a girl who looks and acts exactly like her and even does concerts in her stead; and incidentally wants to off her. "Wish scientist" extraordinaire Kurea first theorizes that one of Linaria’s fans has created their ideal version of her because they can’t approach her directly. At first Linaria concludes that she unconsciously "wished" her double into existence − an ideal, more perfect version of herself. But chapter 13 reveals that she’s the doppelgänger, created by Linaria’s manager who was incidentally her stalker and loved the "imperfect" Linaria.
- Flying Seafood Special: The city has fish flying all around it as if it was a giant aquarium, which reinforces the feeling of being constantly in a dream, a place that’s not quite real.
- Identical Panel Gag: This is Masuda Eiji we’re talking about. While it’s not used as prominently as in Jitsu wa or Hachi, there are still some copy-pasted page compositions in the more wacky chapters, notably chapter 7 focused on the crane Tanya.
- Idiot Hair: Both Tanya (chapter 2, 7 and 9) and Ritsu (chapter 3 and 7) sport a very prominent one, although their idiocy manifests in different ways − the former is clumsy and blatantly selfish while the latter is overly formal yet completely obsessed with food.
- Occult Detective: Claire and her beloved Professor investigate on wishes and their supernatural effects since the Crash, taking requests from strangers to elucidate mysteries in chapter 6 and 8. It is thus ironic that both of them are strongly implied to be some kind of ghosts.
- Phenotype Stereotype: Played With − Tanya, as a Russian crane, is naturally white as a bird and thus has the white hair and teal eyes typical of Russian manga characters as a human.
- Pretty Freeloader: Tanya is a crane that was a saved by a boy named Takashi in the past and has now taken a human form to "repay her debt", as cranes do in folk tales. Problem is, she's a good-for-nothing and ends just squatting his house for free and reading manga all day − not that Takashi minds.
- Psychological Horror: Chapter 3 (focused on Uzuki Ritsu) has some elements of it, especially at the very end where Ritsu seems to genuinely restrain herself to not eat her new friend alive; but it’s most prominent in chapter 8, focused on an "invisible woman" where "Cuco" is trapped in a cycle of constantly erasing her own memory and it turns out she has already "met" with Claire several times, which the latter gleefully reveals to her; she’s also terrified to find out that she is, in fact, not invisible and people call her by her old name. It and and chapter 12-13 (see Doppelgänger above) are so far the only chapters that are almost devoid of comedy.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: For the first 13 chapters, no one bats an eye at trains flying around. Then comes chapter 14 where the world’s distortion ends and a train stops flying… destroying several buildings in its fall (though miraculously killing no one). Unlike what you’d expect from this series, the incident is in no way Played for Laughs.
