If you're only familiar with Kazuo Umezz's previously released titles from Viz's current Perfect Edition run, My Name Is Shingo may surprise you. That's not because it's more science fiction than horror or features a central romance, but because this is very much a slow burn. At the end of these two volumes, we still don't know who “Shingo” is or what he has to do with the story, and the science fiction elements feel almost cursory for most of the books. Instead, the story focuses on human relationships, with what feels like an ancillary plot about a robot.

That sensation, that the robot storyline is somehow less important than the human one, is very deliberate, and Umezz is just playing with our perception of it. The robot is actually the narrator of the story, meaning that it's clearly not unimportant; it just needs the human players to reach a certain point before it can fully enter the picture. This emphasizes one of the major themes of the work, which is the idea of perspective. Even the robot itself is the embodiment of this issue: when protagonist Satoru, a twelve-year-old sixth grader, learns that a “robot” is coming to work at his dad's factory, he immediately envisions a Gundam-like being, humanoid and possibly sentient. Instead, Monroe and its companion robot Leigh (named after actresses Marilyn Monroe and Vivian Leigh) are much more mechanical – they're a post with an arm and three grabbing/slicing appendages. They look less like a robot or a computer than basic hardware, decorated with pinups of the actresses who gave them their names.

Satoru doesn't give any indication of being upset by this, especially once he learns his father is going to be in charge of Monroe's operation. While his mother frets that the robot will replace the humans at work, Satoru takes the manual and learns how to program Monroe, which is what sets everything in motion. On his first visit to the factory, Satoru meets Marin, a girl from another school, and the two are instantly attracted to each other. They begin visiting Monroe and using their latent programming skills to “teach” the robot to recognize faces, answer questions, and successfully mimic being human. Eventually, the two come to rely on Monroe as a steadier ally and source of information than any of the adults they know, something that Monroe's narration looks on with what sounds like regret.

Although the children could be said to be simply using Monroe as a technological version of a secret fort, circa 1983, what's more important to them is their burgeoning feelings. Marin and Satoru quickly become inseparable, which people in their neighborhood absolutely notice. The adults are somehow ashamed of the children, embarrassed by what they view as a too-adult precocity, and both sets of parents try to blame the other child. Once again, this plays into the theme of humanity and perceptions, because Satoru and Marin do have strong feelings for each other, even if the adults think that they're playing at it. When the children run away and endanger themselves in pursuit of being together, the grownups still don't fully understand the seriousness with which the couple is acting: to them, it's all a game gone too far. There are components of that, mostly around the way the children use Monroe and come to their conclusions, but that doesn't negate their emotions, which the emotionally illiterate adults cannot see.

This raises the question of what “humanity” really is. The adults are stuck in their ways, beholden to a worldview they inherited from their parents, who would have lived through the Second World War, and they find the future alarming and see Monroe as a threat. The children were raised in the 1970s with budding space programs around the world making technology and the future look like something exciting, and their facility with Monroe's programming indicates that they see it as an opportunity. Have they grown up more quickly than their parents want to believe? Maybe, but that also could show that the gap between adult and child is insurmountable, with the adults seeing children as they want to, not as they really are, reducing them to something less than fully-fledged humans. Monroe occupies the space in between these two areas, learning “humanity” from both the eager children and the frightened adults, although how that will ultimately turn out is a question for another volume.

My Name Is Shingo is dense, both in story and art. Umezz's usual detailed style becomes claustrophobic in many of these books, and he uses pixel art alongside the more traditional hand-drawn style. The characters' world feels gritty and grubby, a place where people are stuck rather than working at living, and it can be overwhelming. Volume two introduces some elements of suicide (although it isn't framed as such), as well as the disconnect between love and more hormonal lust, and both of these things involving twelve-year-olds mean that this series is not going to be for everyone, even if you're a fan of Umezz's other works. But this science fiction horror story from the early days of computers and robotics is fascinating, even as it takes its time getting to where it's going. It's for readers who like their sci-fi gritty and their human emotions close to the surface, a story that's playing its cards close to its chest but revealing just enough to make us wonder where it will end.