Another Review: A Cursed Class Where Someone Already Dead Sits Among the Living

Japanese horror is at its best when it's quiet — when the dread comes from a rule you don't understand yet, not a monster jumping out. Another is built almost entirely on that kind of dread: a class with a curse, a girl with an eyepatch everyone pretends not to see, and a count of the dead that won't stop rising until someone figures out the rule.

The first time the rule clicked for me, I had to put the book down.

Quick Take

• A chilling mystery-horror adapted from Yukito Ayatsuji's acclaimed novel
• Built on a single eerie premise: Class 3-3 is cursed, and one student every year is secretly already dead
• Rated M (Mature); 4 volumes in Japan, collected in English by Yen Press as a single complete omnibus

Who Is This Manga For?

• Fans of atmospheric Japanese horror and ghost stories
• Readers who enjoy puzzle-box mysteries with a strict internal logic
• Anyone who likes slow-burn dread punctuated by Final Destination-style deaths
• Viewers of the anime who want the original manga's version

Content Warnings & Age Rating

Age Rating: M (Mature) Content Warnings: Graphic, often elaborate deaths; gore; psychological horror; the dread builds toward genuinely disturbing payoffs

The M rating is accurate. The deaths are creative and gruesome.

Story Overview

Koichi Sakakibara transfers to Yomiyama North Middle School and joins Class 3-3. From the start, something is wrong. The other students are tense and evasive. A quiet, beautiful girl named Mei Misaki wears a patch over one eye — and the entire class, including the teachers, behaves as though she does not exist.

Koichi slowly uncovers the class's terrible history. Decades earlier, a popular student named Misaki died mid-year, and the grieving class pretended Misaki was still alive until graduation. Since then, Class 3-3 has been cursed: in certain years, an "extra" person joins the class — someone who is, in fact, already dead, slipped seamlessly into everyone's memory and records so that no one can tell who the dead one is. In those years, students and their families begin dying in gruesome accidents, one after another, until the year ends.

The class has a countermeasure: choose one student to be treated as "not there" — ignored completely, as if they don't exist — to balance the extra and stop the deaths. This year, that student is Mei, which is why everyone ignores her. But the deaths begin anyway, which means the countermeasure has failed, and Koichi and Mei must work out who the extra is and how to end the curse before the body count consumes the class. The solution requires a horrifying realization about the rule itself.

Characters

Koichi Sakakibara — The transfer student and audience surrogate, whose outsider status lets him ask the questions the cursed class has learned not to. His relationship with Mei, and his refusal to simply accept the class's silence, drives the investigation.

Mei Misaki — The girl with the eyepatch, designated "the one who doesn't exist" this year. Quiet and watchful, she sees things others can't — and her eyepatch conceals a detail central to the curse. She is the still center of the story's dread.

Class 3-3 — Functionally a character in itself: a group of teenagers carrying a curse they didn't create, bound by rules they're terrified to break, slowly fracturing as the deaths mount and suspicion spreads.

What I Love About It

The rule. Another is one of the cleanest examples of horror-as-logic-puzzle: the curse has strict mechanics, the countermeasure has a specific failure condition, and the solution depends on accepting a truth the characters desperately don't want to accept. The dread comes not from gore but from the slow understanding of how the system works and what it implies about who, exactly, the extra is. When you finally grasp the rule, every earlier scene reorganizes itself in your head. That's the pleasure of a great mystery, applied to horror.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The realization of how to identify the extra — the discovery that the dead one has been so perfectly inserted into reality that even photographs and records have been altered, so no ordinary investigation can find them, and the only way to stop the deaths is to "return" the extra to death. The horror of the climax is that the solution requires the class to do something monstrous on incomplete information, in a panic, with deaths still happening around them. The chaos of the final act — when the countermeasure has failed and people are dying and the answer demands a terrible act — is where the slow-burn dread finally detonates.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• An exceptionally clean horror premise with strict, satisfying internal logic
• Atmospheric small-town dread, beautifully rendered by Kiyohara
• Creative, shocking deaths that escalate the stakes
• A faithful adaptation of a landmark J-horror novel; complete and self-contained

Cons

• The slow-burn pacing tests readers who want immediate scares
• The large class cast means some victims are barely characterized before they die
• The curse's logic, while satisfying, requires patience to assemble — that's the appeal or the frustration depending on you

Is Another Worth Reading?

Yes — it's a standout of atmospheric Japanese horror, and the manga captures the novel's dread and the puzzle's payoff. For readers who like their horror built on a rule rather than a monster, it's essential.

Where to Buy

Read the first volume. If it doesn't hook you, put it down. It'll hook you.

Start with Volume 1 →

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