What would you do if the house you just moved into came with a cute ghost?
Looking for more information?
Who wrote Ako and Bambi?
- HERO
- This is the author of Horimiya!
- You can find their X profile here!
Who is the publisher?
- Yen Press
How many volumes are there?
- There are currently 5 volumes out in English!
- There are 8 volumes published in Japanese.
What happens in volume 1?
This volume does a fantastic job of introducing us to both the main characters, and the overall mystery that will further entangle all of the characters.
We are first introduced to our main character, Kojika, A.K.A Bambi. He works as a freelance writer, currently finishing up a horror story contract. After blurting out his disbelief in ghosts, we are quickly introduced to his roommate: the recently deceased Ako.
Ako… The Ghost?
Though Ako introduces herself as a ghost, and is able to phase in and out of existence at will, she is still able to touch Bambi somehow. As if she didn’t already come with enough mysteries, it seems like someone knows that she is haunting Bambi’s apartment.
For a ghost she’s rather cheerful, providing rather good company for Bambi who lives by himself.
Yamashiro..?
The story then jumps to a high school, where we meet a mysterious girl named Yamashiro. She’s a quiet student, who seems to suffer from insomnia. She seems to know some rather important information about our writer Bambi, though we don’t exactly know how she knows..
Now that our main characters have been introduced, the story jumps around from Bambi and Ako to Yamashiro quite a bit. While we get to slowly see progression in Bambi and Ako’s relationship, we see that Yamashiro is somewhat ostracized at her school. While she is rather close with a boy she calls a childhood friend, her female classmates seem to strongly dislike her for reasons still unknown.
A Surprising Meeting, A Surprising Revelation
We are then given a rather startling piece of information: Ako and Yamashiro are one in the same, Ako claims. When she falls asleep, her soul slips out of her body and travels to Bambi’s side for some reason.
She tells this to Bambi, after finding out who he is by using the bits and pieces of her “dreams” that she can remember. Bambi, while surprised, does note that Ako and Yamashiro do have a similar face. Besides their faces though, the two girls couldn’t be any more different. Ako is a very cheerful, talkative girl. While Yamashiro is a rather gloomy, quiet girl.
So… Exactly why does Yamashiro’s spirit leave her body to be by Bambi’s side? Why does Ako think that she died? Why can Yamashiro remember bits and pieces of Ako’s actions, but Ako can’t remember anything?
There is a lot of mystery introduced in this volume!
Maddies Ratings
The characters
I really enjoyed learning about the characters in this volume, and am very excited to learn more about them!!
Kojika (Bambi) is a very interesting character! I love it when main characters are written to have a passion for writing, so I am a little bias~. He dropped out of school in order to pursue writing, much to the dismay of his classmates. We don’t really learn much of his family situation in this volume, nor exactly what led to him moving out to live on his own. I think it’s interesting that he was depicted as hating scary stories, as now he specializes in horror stories!
Ako/Yamashiro is a very cute, but mysterious girl, and I’m very excited to learn more about her! Both her sleep and awake self have very unique personality traits, and I wonder if were she able to fix her current condition, would they be able to merge into one? While Ako is almost overly cheerful, Yamashiro is almost overly gloomy. I guess I’ll just have to read on to learn more about them…
Romance
There is no romance in this volume.
Storytelling
The storytelling in this series is very interesting! It isn’t exactly linear, and it jumps around from character to character, but I was never confused as to what was happening. We were given enough backstory to understand why Bambi is where he currently is in life, but we were kept in the dark enough to be able to enjoy the mystery.
I am curious to see whether this series will focus more or romance, or the mystery as it progresses.
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