Warning: Due to the story's short length, all spoilers will be unmarked by default.
An unnamed traveler, who is on a journey of his own, finds a dead female child in the middle of a battlefield ravaged from an unknown war. Not long after, the ghost of the same girl appears beside the traveler, now acting as his travelling companion. But for some reason, despite being a ghost, the traveler can see her. This fateful encounter catalyses the traveler's journey, as he finds out that this ghost girl is more to who she is, who bore the painful scars of the same war that struck her homeland and costed her life.Cluster of Life (命の塊 Inochi no Katamari) is a doujinshi Slice of Life manga firstly released by the famed author Cool-Kyou Shinsha back in 2008. The first of his written works, Cluster of Life would directly serve as the pivot to his career as a professional Mangaka. The original translation can be found here: Link
Tropes regarding Cluster of Life
- Arc Words: "Curse". Nearly everything about the Ghost Girl's sentences are littered with the same word, which could be passed off as gibberish. In essence, she's a walking metaphor of why her soul is not put to rest, essentially because as long as she still exists as a ghost, she plans to curse humanity for their sins.
- But Now I Must Go:
- Averted at first when the Ghost Girl outright declares how she dislikes someone who travels that hates her, with The Traveler leaving. Cue one month later, the war was over and he comes back as her companion, albeit it turns out that she is Fading Away slowly.
- At the end after the ghost girl disappears and visits the afterlife, the traveler pays respects to her before planning to go back to his homeland to his own family.
- Fading Away: At the start of the story, the ghost girl is visible to the Traveler, where he can see her. That also extends to her father, albeit she was unaware that he was looking at her own ghost, clearly showing the distance between both of them. One month later, the ghost girl becomes subsequently transparent and fading away, where only the Traveler can see her, before she too is invisible to him. In the final ends of the story, she fully disappears.
- Foil: The Traveler and the Ghost Girl themselves.
- Both are lone wolves who are equally distant to humanity and have separated themselves from their own parents for different reasons. Though unlike the Ghost Girl who has extreme hatred for them after she was abandoned, the Traveler abandoned them for a very different reason due to his inferiority complex, and in one dialogue he reveals how they were great to him, heavily implying that they raised him well.
- Their personalities are quite different to one another. The Traveler is a calm, quiet and reasonable man who is calm with the goings of their own world, even staying unmoved in one panel when the Ghost Girl loudly declared how she hated every human. The Ghost Girl is misanthropic, anger-prone and suicidal, going through various Straw Nihilist rants about the state of their world, who pointed out to the Traveler about her hatred to anything including her parents, the whole world in general and the war, noting how in her current existence she will curse anyone.
- Great Offscreen War: A massive war broke out between several unknown countries, which ultimately led to the destruction and carnage that is seen in the present at one panel of the manga. Similarly, the same war was the cause of this world's problems, mainly the death of the ghost girl that was tied back to it and how she bore hatred to not only the world but to both the war herself and her own parents.
- Minimalist Cast: Only the Ghost Girl and the Traveler are considered the most important characters of this story.
- Non-Standard Character Design: Applies to not only the story as a whole, but to both the main characters as well, who were drawn in pencil sketches, a far cry to his much later works which were drawn more artistically.
- Time Skip: The final tail end of the story takes place one month later.
