'The Demon Ororon' Vol. 1-4 by Hakase Mizuki

ISBN: 1427807329
Format: Paperback, 880pp
Publisher: TOKYOPOP
Pub. Date: December 18, 2007
Price: $19.99

“So it was in the fall of my fifteenth year… that my first love died. He was just some broken guy I picked up on a rainy day… some lonely devil … who had beautiful dark gray eyes… and smelled like blood.”

Don’t expect it to end happily. Not everything does. Don’t expect it to be perfect. Not everything is. Prepare to fall in love and get your heart broken. Prepare to hold your chin up knowing what will come and how it will turn out. You won’t turn away, not because you wouldn’t like to but because you can’t.

When Chiaki meets Ororon he’s sitting in the rain, soaked and hurt, waiting to die. But she takes him home with her, against the advice of her best friend Rika, and treats his wounds. Chiaki is just one of those people with a good heart; a pacifist to her core, she abhors violence, so when she learns that this mysterious man she’s rescued is none other than the King of Hell she isn’t sure what to think. But her heart, which very rarely has anything to do with the head, falls in love with him anyway.

Ororon immediately recognizes Chiaki for what she is and understands why she has been followed all her life by monsters and ghosts, and why she can give them a kind of release. Chiaki is the daughter of an angel and a human, but not just any angel — her father was the Archangel Michael. But can a half breed angel and the Lord of Hell not only coexist but love?

Because Chiaki has saved Ororon’s life he offers to grant her one wish. That wish? For Ororon to stay with her forever, which he grants without a moment's hesitation. But Ororon and Chiaki aren’t going to have it easy. Ororon left his throne and ran into the mortal world, trying to escape the constant assassination attempts made by his older brothers, each of which want the throne for themselves. They aren’t going to stop just because he’s left hell.

With a large cast of characters ranging from the wonderfully cute demon cat brothers Shiro and Kuro, demon house keeper Miss Lucy, Ororon’s brother Othello — not to mention the many evil brothers and demons that come into play — this story moves swiftly and surely toward the inevitable ending.

This is Romeo and Juliet between Hell and Heaven. The damned and the good falling in love and struggling to find that middle ground where life can be lived in all gray tones; where the stark bleak realities of a black and white world don’t overshadow a tender passion surrounded by blood and sin.

The Demon Ororon should be recommended reading for everyone, a timeless story filled with enough gore to keep the guys turning pages while the heart-wrenching love story will keep most girls involved. Not to mention the elongated stylized bodies, and the tilted faces with side long glances that pop from the page and bring each moment into painful reality.

On December 18th Tokyopop is releasing an edition with all four volumes in one. Trust me, you will want to read it this way, because once I finished volume one I couldn’t stop until I had devoured the others. Lose yourself in The Demon Ororon — a story of heartbreak and belonging, of fighting and loving and lessons in how, in the end sometimes, it just doesn’t work out.