A mother's worst nightmare.
Given that Maria no Danzai is about a vengeful mother seeking revenge against a group of bullies that caused her son's death, it's guaranteed that there are some moments that will leave the reader terrified as they go on.In General
General
- Nozomu Okaya. A teenager who can convincingly portray himself as a charming and kind-hearted young man but is, in reality, a ruthless and remorseless sociopath who sadistically brutalizes anyone he likes simply because he can! Even worse is how he never raises his voice nor drops his smile even when saying or doing the most horrific things. What sells it is how his eyes look downright dead, emphasizing his utter lack of humanity. The reason he bullies Kiritaka and makes his life a living hell? Because he didn't like the defiant look in Kiritaka's eyes!
- His whole freaking gang is more than willing to do deplorable atrocities to their victims and laugh at them - as middle schoolers! Be it feeding people cockroaches, forcing them to find a key in thumbtacks with their tongue while treating them as a dog, threatening to kill a rabbit unless they write suicidal notes, blackmailing them into breaking their legs by jumping off a cliff! And when their victim dies because of them, their only thought is not wanting to go to prison "for a guy like him" and running away from the scene, not caring about the mother crying as her beloved child was taken away from her in her sight. Two years later, they've gone on destroying other people's lives as they please, as if nothing happened. When they find themselves at Maria's mercy, Kowase and Shikimi even curse Kiritaka, making it clear they are absolute demons without regrets just as Kiritaka described them. Had they not died for their unspeakable crimes, imagine what they would do as adults!
- Mari Nagare/Maria Akeboshi is a broken woman who was destroyed by her son's death and resorted to throwing away her life to hunt down the bullies responsible for his death. She was once happily married and had a loving relationship with her son and husband. She has dreams of being a school nurse but put that on hold to be a mother to her son, and it's clear that she has no regrets about letting go of that dream for her son. It was revealed that she grew up an orphan and was bullied, but a school nurse showed her kindness, and it was implied that the nurse's kindness positively affected her. She grew up as a mother and a housewife and was happy with her life. Then she saw her beloved son die and could do nothing to hold his body. A police investigation told her that her son's death was a suicide because of abusive parents, leaving her heartbroken. Then she read her son's journal and learned the truth that bullies tortured him for months, and they caused his death. She snaps and throws away her marriage and her previous life, gets a new identity, and two years later, she becomes a nurse at the bully's school to get revenge. Maria has done her homework on the boys using her son's notes and her own research to know the bullies, personality crimes, and habits; she slowly uses their personal flaws to destroy their lives, break them emotionally, and kill them, with the bullies dying despair deaths. Maria Is a horrifying example of a mother driven to despair and madness over her son's death. Maria keeps her cruelty to her son's bullies, and it makes it clear that they are 100% monsters who deserve to die. It's clear that Maria means no harm to anyone else, is willing to give kindness to people who need it, and refuses to kill anyone else who's not involved in her son's death, even if they are vile; it's horrifying to see some are formally good woman and mother be reduced to an empty shell of her former self hunting the monsters that killed her son for revenge. Maria isn't even getting any enjoyment out of killing her son's bullies, and she is mentally unwell. While Maria will get revenge for her son, it will likely cost her her sanity and life.
Maria no Danzai Chapters
Volume 1
Chapter 1: IS THAT LOVE OR IS IT ARROGANCE
- Kiritaka's death. Okaya and his friends force Kiritaka to jump off a balcony or have a heavily edited porn video of his mother posted onto the internet. Not only do his legs get broken, but his bones are visible through the flesh. Then he gets hit by a truck and has his intestines smeared across the pavement, leaving a traumatized Mari to cradle what's left of his body in tears.
Chapter 3: SAINT MARIA IS WATCHING YOU
- Kowase draws a cardboard cutter on Yashima when he becomes convinced that she's the one who hacked his phone. Her face becomes the textbook definition of fear at the sight.
- Maria's face as she sedates and kidnaps Kowase.
Chapter 4: SHOW THY SINS
- When Kowase realizes that Maria is not joking about killing him by drowning him, he attempts to talk her down to escape his predicament. Kowase insists that he was just fooling around with Yashima, and while he was a little rough with her, he would've stopped if Yashima had told him to; but because she said nothing, that means it wasn't such a big deal. We see a flashback with Yashima in her underwear with a broken face, with the implication that he forced her to have sex with him. This monster abused this poor girl, and his poor attempt at an excuse only shows that he doesn't even really believe that what he did was wrong. He is a horrifying example of a scumbag that abuses and rapes women and feels he did nothing wrong.
- Maria's face as Kowase realizes he has no choice but to cut off his own hand in order to escape.
Chapter 5: I TOLD YOU SO
- Kowase's death, he may have been a depraved scumbag, but it was still horrifying to see him drown and the life leave him as he desperately tries to escape by cutting his hand off, only for him not to be able to cut the bone with him drowning and the last thing he is seeing this is his dying face in a picture.
- Kowase himself proves how much of a terrifying person he is and how the world is better off without him when he dies. In his last thoughts, Kowase showed how much of a scumbag he was when he revealed that he wanted to get rich by abusing women. No wonder Maria herself said that his greatest crime was being born and not what he did to her son, an understandable sentiment considering what he had done to both Yashima and Kiritaka and possibly countless other people, which perfectly describes what kind of useless scumbag Kowase is and how everyone else is better off without him. As grim as his death was considering how monstrous he was, and the possible other women he blackmailed and grapes, along with the other victims he helped abuse in his gang, The world truly is better off without him. He shouldn't have been born.
Volume 2
Chapter 6: LIES IN THE COLOR OF THE MAY LILY
- The scene where Kumiru manipulates vulnerable men to give her money, which she cruelly calls "fishing". The man genuinely opened himself to her, believing she was a kind and caring girl because she acted nice and always paid for the meals. He holds her in a gentle embrace, and his words imply that women hurt him in the past. Kumiru makes the man emotional by guessing that he has always had trouble with women, causing him to tear up. Then Kumiru's thug Iijima comes in and beats up the poor man, mocks him for being a pervert despite him not doing anything sexual with Kumiru with him just holding her, and Kumiru reveals the deceit and blackmails the poor man, heartbroken out of money. It’s disturbing how this heartless harpy is able to put this poor man into this compromising position to exploit him for money and how she cruelly plays with his emotions only to break his heart in the worst way possible.
Volume 3
Chapter 16: THE SEARCH FOR THE QUASI-GANGSTER
- Maria's vision of her dead son's face. We can see his crushed and long tongue covered in blood, his lower teeth, and his brain. The rest of his face is completely hollow. This shows how much Kiritaka's corpse has deeply traumatized and scarred his mother.
Chapter 18: BERSERK
- One time Kinugawa got so angry at Kiritaka that he kneed him in the stomach until he began to throw up, then strangled him so that he would choke on his own vomit.
- Iijima's dead body. Without eyes. It is clear from the state of his corpse he was tortured before being killed.
Chapter 19: FOREIGN SUBSTANCE
- Maria deduces that an unknown third party with unknown motives was responsible for Iijima's death. Because the timing of his death is way too close for it to be a coincidence and because Maria made sure to not get caught by any cameras in the area when she took down Iijima's thugs, she also deduces that the culprit may have been at the scene, watching her. Or worse: they might know her.
- Maria grows worried that the culprit could cause trouble in the future, and she might be right: Okaya also guesses that Maria didn't kill Iijima, and sees the culprit's interference as an opportunity to potentially strike back against her.
Chapter 20: CULPRIT
- We get to see the reappearance of the kid that Kiritaka Nagare saved, Akihiro Yuda. He appears to be a normal but quiet young man who works at a store, but then we see him having a fantasy about brutally murdering a rude customer, showing how mentally unwell he is and making it abundantly clear that Okaya and his friends' torture of him has scarred him mentally. Yuda may not have acted on his violent thoughts (thankfully), but it's still scary how he wishes for the customer to die, as much of a jerkass he is, and how the trauma and torture that was inflicted on him has affected him even if he's not a violent person.
Chapter 21: TRAITOR
- The fact that Okaya had the nerve to be at his victim Kiritaka's funeral and actually asked another one of his victims, Yuda, why Kiritaka died. It is understandable why Akihiro Yuda cried at the funeral and could not confront Okaya.
- Yuda became a recluse because of the trauma he suffered and because of the guilt of his friend sacrificing himself for him before dying at the hands of Okaya and his gang. Ultimately, Yuda snapped because the very same demons that tortured him and his friend are still having happy lives without a care in the world, so he trained himself to be a killer to torture them. It is unnerving seeing Yuda describe how he trained himself by dissecting a frog and the torture he planned on inflicting upon them before he spotted Maria.
Chapter 22: FATE・DESTINY・MISSION
- This chapter shows much more about how Yuda's mind has become disturbed because of the trauma and guilt he suffered.
- He became so entranced by the sight of Maria killing Kowase that he followed her all the way home, broke into her house and searched her room to learn more about her. While this is already creepy, when Yuda laid eyes on the altar Maria made for Kiritaka he decided that it was his destiny to help her. He then began following Maria everywhere, blurring the line between Loony Fan and Stalker without a Crush (or perhaps with a Crush, if his blushing is any indication). The night Maria took Iijima to the love hotel? Yuda was in the next room, peeping through a hole in the wall. When Maria decided not to kill Iijima, Yuda unilaterally decided to do it for her, believing that this was his "mission."
- When Yuda tried to kill Iijima by smashing his head with a hammer so that he wouldn't get in the way of Maria's revenge, he ended up accidentally pushing him downstairs, leading to his death by a broken neck. At that moment, as Yuda contemplated Iijima's corpse, he visualized Okaya in his place. While panting and blushing heavily. This chapter also makes clear how much he worshipped the ground Maria walks on for hunting down the bullies that killed Kiritaka, as Yuda voices his willingness to be put at risk by offering himself as a tool for Maria (whom he idolizes) to use in order to atone for Kiritaka. It is clear that the guilt from his friend's death and the trauma he suffered from the bullies have twisted him into a killer in the making, and he is willing to be used to get revenge on the monsters who killed his friend.
Chapter 23: THE FANATICS
- Maria rejects having Yuda as her helper, revealing that she recorded his confession to killing Iijima and warns him to get out of the car or she will go to the police with the confession. But as Maria drives away and looks at her rearview mirror, Yuda has this twisted smile on him, indicating that he has not given up on helping her. Yuda's guilt and trauma have twisted him into a murderer, and while his targets are scumbags that deserve to die, it's unnerving to see how dedicated he is to Maria and how driven he is in wanting to kill his targets.
- Okaya and Kinugawa suspect that Taiichiro has murdered their two friends, so Kinugawa decides to break into his home to look for evidence while he's away. It's horrifying that Taiichiro is on their radar for suspecting their friends' murder, along with the fact that Kinugawa, a monster who is known to brutalize people at the slightest provocation, is in Taiichiro's house and could turn him into his next victim.
- Which might well actually happen, as Taiichiro returns home for a change of clothes while Kinugawa is still inside. And the only person who's currently in any kind of position to do anything about it is Yuda, who was stalking Kinugawa to prove to Maria that he can still be useful.
