Alice & Zouroku Review: The Reality-Warping Girl Needed a Grumpy Florist, Not a Hero

When I was a kid hiding from the world inside manga, the fantasy I reached for most was power. If I just had something — strength, a special ability, anything — the kids who isolated me would stop, and adults would finally see me. That fantasy is everywhere in shonen. Alice & Zouroku is the rare series that takes a child who actually has unlimited power and tells her, very plainly, that it does not matter. You still have to eat your dinner. You still have to say sorry when you're wrong.

I went into this expecting a sci-fi chase story — girl with reality-warping powers, shadowy lab, men in suits. What I got instead was a grumpy old florist named Zouroku scolding a god-tier esper for being rude, and somehow that became one of the most quietly moving things I read that year.

Quick Take

• A sci-fi premise — a child who can materialize anything from imagination — anchored by the most un-sci-fi character imaginable: a cantankerous elderly flower-shop owner who refuses to be impressed
• The series asks what a "child with limitless power" actually needs, and answers: not adventure, but structure, family, and an adult unafraid to correct her
• Rated T (Teen); gentle by genre standards, with brief sci-fi action and unsettling research-facility backstory, but nothing graphic

Story Overview

Sana is one of the "Dreams of Alice" — people who can pull whatever they imagine into physical reality. Her power is so vast she's been kept and studied in a secret research facility for as long as she can remember. The series opens with her escape, fleeing through Shinjuku in a stolen car, hunted by lab agents who can also bend reality.

She runs straight into Kashimura Zouroku, a white-haired florist with a permanent scowl and a deep hatred of anything crooked or dishonest. Sana tries to use her powers to get her way with him. He is completely unmoved. He feeds her anyway — because she's a hungry-looking kid — and that refusal to treat her as special is the engine of the whole story. Zouroku raised his granddaughter Sanae himself after losing his daughter, so he has zero patience for theatrics and zero awe for the supernatural.

The manga moves through several arcs. First, Sana's integration into the Kashimura household and the fallout from the facility, which is eventually raided and shut down by police, its director Kito arrested, after which the government openly acknowledges Dreams of Alice and forms an agency to manage them. Then come the human-scale arcs: Minnie C. Tachibana, an American Dream of Alice trying to resurrect her dead husband through Sana's power, and finally the Wonderland arc centered on Hatori, a lonely elementary schooler whose power has been quietly warping her own family. The story lands not on a world-ending battle but on Sana going to school, sitting in a classroom next to the very kids her story tangled with.

Characters

Sana (the "Red Queen") — Her arc isn't about mastering her power; she already has it from page one. It's about learning that power and connection are different things. She begins as a child who understands force but not relationship, who expects to take what she wants, and ends as someone who can sit at a dinner table, attend school, and exist in genuine bonds with other people. The most important thing about her turns out to be the least flashy.

Zouroku Kashimura — The series' strangest and best idea. He's old, blunt, and "hates anything crooked." He isn't wise about supernatural children; he's just a man who already raised a child and knows kids need rules more than they need awe. His care comes out as structure and expectation, not coddling — and that's exactly what makes it land. When he commits to taking Sana in, it's framed not as heroism but as the obvious thing a man of his generation does.

Sanae Kashimura — Zouroku's granddaughter, gentle and easygoing, who becomes the warm older-sister figure to Sana that balances Zouroku's gruffness. She does the day-to-day softening — the comfort, the patience — that the old man won't.

Minnie C. Tachibana — A former U.S. Marine and Dream of Alice, grief-stricken over her dead husband. Her power manifests as enormous arms shaped like him, and she pursues Sana to access enough power to bring him back. She's an antagonist built entirely out of mourning, not malice.

Hatori — A small girl convinced her parents' constant fighting is her fault. Her Dream of Alice power unconsciously mind-controls them into false harmony, and when she realizes she's been doing it, she's horrified — believing she's become an "evil witch." She's the emotional core of the late series.

What I Love About It

It's the scenes where Zouroku tells Sana, flat-out, that she did something wrong — and her powers mean nothing in that moment. She can reshape reality, and it still doesn't get her out of a scolding. He treats her as a child who needs guidance, not a fragile miracle who needs protecting. Every other adult in the story sees Sana as a weapon, an asset, or a god. Zouroku sees a rude kid who skipped her manners.

What gets me is how the manga uses its own art to argue this. Imai draws the reality-warping sequences with genuine dreamlike scale — impossible spaces, materialized armies, whole skylines bending — and then cuts to a cramped dinner table where an old man is telling a girl to eat her vegetables. The contrast is the entire thesis. The most powerful being in the story is most herself when she's just a kid in a flower shop. I grew up wishing power would fix my loneliness; this manga gently insists that what actually fixes it is someone ordinary deciding you're theirs to look after.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The Wonderland climax is the payoff. Hatori, drowning in guilt, freezes the entire city, and Sana confronts her — but their powers cancel each other out, so Sana can't manifest a thing against her. Things spiral until Sana ends up trapped inside Wonderland, an alternate dimension born from her own power, which begins expanding outward to swallow the real world.

And the rescue is not a superpower. It's Zouroku. The old florist physically goes to the facility, enters Wonderland to find her, and when the dimension is bulging toward reality and everyone with abilities is helpless to stop it — Zouroku simply yells at Wonderland to stop. And it stops. Not because he has power. Because his authority over Sana, the realness of him as her family, outweighs the warped logic of her own creation. A man with no abilities at all halts a reality-eating dimension by being, essentially, the grandfather who said no. That image — the powerless old man overruling infinite power through sheer relationship — is the whole series compressed into one moment, and I haven't shaken it.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Zouroku is one of the most unusual and effective adult characters in this corner of manga
• The found-family bond is earned through small daily friction, never just asserted
• Warm without tipping into saccharine; the sci-fi serves the emotion, not the other way around
• Imai's art sells both the dreamlike and the domestic with equal skill

Cons

• Readers craving action-forward sci-fi will find this far too quiet
• The research-facility and lore elements stay thinner than the domestic story
• The pacing is slow and meandering — that's either a flaw or the entire point, depending on what you want from it

Is Alice & Zouroku Worth Reading?

If you want a sci-fi story that uses its high-concept premise to ask a small, human question — what does a powerful child actually need? — then yes, absolutely. It's a gentle, character-first found-family manga with a genuinely original adult lead. If you came for esper battles and lab conspiracies as the main event, you'll be impatient. The power is the hook; the flower shop is the heart.

Official English Translation Status

Seven Seas Entertainment licensed the series and released Volumes 1 through 9 in English (2017–2021). The Japanese manga ran in Tokuma Shoten's Monthly Comic Ryū and concluded at 13 volumes, but the remaining volumes (10–13) have not yet appeared in English. So the English release covers the bulk of the story but is not yet complete — worth knowing before you commit.

Similar Manga

Title	Its Approach	How Alice & Zouroku Differs
Sweetness and Lightning	A widowed father learning to cook for and raise his daughter	Swaps the parent for a gruff grandfather and adds a reality-warping sci-fi premise
The Girl from the Other Side	A quiet, supernatural bond between a child and a non-human guardian	Trades eerie fairytale dread for grounded, sometimes comedic domestic life
A Man and His Cat	An older man and a small dependent finding unlikely family	Replaces the cat with a god-tier esper child, but keeps the same tender register

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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