I just realized, those two panels of "where is she" could be a hint? I might just be half asleep, but it almost gave the impression that Honami's spirit was ejected somehow before Nagi(?) could annihilate her. That would also be one possible reason why poor Tear saw what she did: it could have been the ugly aftermath of Nagi frantically searching the body.

Also, how many times have we seen Honami actually speak? I just realized we still didn't this chapter, aside from the last performance.

last edited at Sep 25, 2026 1:11AM

Also, how many times have we seen Honami actually speak? I just realized we still didn't this chapter, aside from the last performance.

The only time Honami's truly said anything was her recent message to Sayaka. Sometimes her SFX border on speech but that's just Japanese onomatopoeia not translating well and Dorothy getting a little loose with the rules for comedy. Even when alive in flashbacks she's never said a word, even going back to the earliest one. There's no hint she's mute; it's only for dramatic purposes.

If Honami remembers everything, her communicating would solve most of the mystery so it can't happen soon. But I really hope she gets to talk before it's over. Dorothy said she was partly inspired by Shibito no Koe wo Kiku ga Yoi, where the main heroine is a ghost who never speaks until the final chapter and you only can guess what she told the protagonist. But I think that's a waste when Honami has so much to her, no matter how expressive she is normally. I mean technically Honami's communicated already so that line's not quite so sacred.

last edited at Sep 25, 2026 5:46AM

OK, that's official. You guys get the sack of salt, I'll get the cross-hilt sword. Someone bring the flamethrower. (Yes, M. Page refference).

the moment aizawa speaks is when she confesses I guess

“Nothing human could have done that to a body.” Never has a manga panel made me feel so unnerved. Just imagining what could’ve possibly mutilated Honami so terribly to the point that blood is leaking out from under the door. The reader left to wonder what horrors Tear could’ve possibly witnessed in that room to leave her in that state. Then you go to the next page and your fears are confirmed if not, worse than you could’ve imagined. What’s left isn’t Honami, in her place is just guts, limbs, and blood, and all you can think is, “Who would do this? Why would someone do this? Just how much hate and rage could drive someone to do something so horrible, so grotesque?”

This is definitely the most uncomfortable chapter I’ve read. You can’t help but feel so helpless, so uncomfortable and disturbed. Dorothy continues to do an amazing job with each chapter. The shift from goofy little ghost manga to a compelling psychological horror is amazing. Every chapter has me on the edge of my seat wanting more. I’m so excited to see where we’ll go from here.

last edited at Sep 26, 2026 1:52AM

Can't deny Karasuma x Tear is endgame after a meet-cute like that. And in 33 they were fun together.

Honestly, Karasuma is fun and I think Tear is probably the only one that would make a sane pairing. Can't wait to go back to the present and see the outcome of Tear realizing why Karasuma wanted to talk to her in the first place, violent fan tendencies aside.

I'll also iterate that Nagi's condition was described differently to Honami's. Honami was 体調が悪い/physically ill while Nagi was simply 不調/unwell. A more generalized term that makes it unclear if Nagi was suffering physically or mentally, but Dorothy has been consistent with symptoms of ghost sickness.

The more I re-read the past two chapters, the more I think Nagi was suffering from depression, without anything supernatural involved. And that her death might have been suicide, for which Honami was present and that she couldn't stop. The phrasing of the circumstances of her death are also highly suspicious.

The "simple" explanation could be that Nagi took her own life, and then became a ghost haunting the rest of the group, then Honami's death and Ange's sickness would have supernatural consequences. Maybe she's the actual killer, maybe not - the role of ghost Michi and possible other hauntings remains unclear in all of this. While I'm not sure simple explanations will cut it, it's at least a grounding possible reading of what we know so far.

It's hard to make out even before my redrawing made it worse but the right half of 21 looks like an impression of Honami's body with broken limbs and strewn organs.

The use of panel 20 is great because it leaves it up to the readers' imagination what Tear has seen, especially when no one else but her has seen it. Panel 21, though... it's nothing concrete but the drawing suggesting bones and viscera is strangely... gory, in a tactful way.

last edited at Sep 26, 2026 7:47AM

I hadn't read this up until today because;

1) Thought it wouldn't be my cuppa tea, I was wrong, this shit is class.

2) It's currently halloween. Can't think of a better time to binge a manga about a girl who sees ghosts.

I finally reached the recent chapters and omg.....I can only hope I'm mentally prepared for what comes next......

With the person searching for Honami on p23 presumably being Michi, that raises some interesting questions about exactly how long Honami was dead before the announcement on August 21st. The message says it happened the day before, but that's also a PR statement from an idol agency.

It's possible that Honami died on the day of the festival. Michi might have had a date with Honami scheduled, and when we see her at the festival in the flashback, it looks kind of like she was waiting for someone by the entrance. The figure we see in the distance might have been a ghost (Honami herself???) telling Michi about her death, or impending death, leading Michi to search frantically for her.

Volume 6 is out! If you want it physically, or digitally here's Kobo or Bookwalker.
Like the raws too, if you can.

Mildly bad news.
After the widespread PHP vulnerability, KimiComi (like many Japanese readers) can no longer be accessed by foreigners without a VPN. If you want to like the raws I'm directing you to NicoNico instead. Unfortunate, as KimiComi is the publisher's site which sends a stronger signal.
And like many manga, economic issues have hit Aizawa-san. Volumes will no longer have color inner illustrations. It could be much worse, which is why it's important to support the manga if you can.

I'm running slow or Dorothy's running fast and ch37 is out as well. It's difficult separating my thoughts, so I'll be a bit disjointed, since these 2 close out Tear's flashback arc. And (as it becomes clearer every chapter) the NeoTear shipping arc. We're all on board.

Karasuma casually dropping some important hints in quick succession:

• She only approached DeLphi while looking into Honami. And Honami was part of checking on Michi. Karasuma seems to have known very little about Honami's haunting & death. That must have been all Michi handling it, and Karasuma's connection only goes so far as being strangely related to Michi.
• As we saw in ch13 Karasuma "failed Michi in the past." That's as vague as anything else in this manga (thank you Tear for calling out the vagueposter queen) but now we get the slightest clarification it directly dealt with Mini Michi. I did think Karasuma recognized Mini Michi, despite not recognizing the AAA star. But this puts things in a stranger light where her decision to spare Honami hinged entirely on Mini Michi's arrival.
• So what is Mini Michi? We just don't know. She's not a ghost at least. But if I'm making a wild guess, she has more to do with Michi's mother than Michi herself. Kurotori Sou is going to factor into the story at some point. Karasuma might be linked to her given a tenuous connection between her moon pendulum, a star pendulum, and the same symbols over Sou's shrine. There's a little secret community of spiritualists in town, some of which are dynastic like Sayaka, and that leaves room for Sou to have both had powers like Michi and had close ties to Karasuma. And if Sou is a major player, Dorothy has already said all the major characters have been introduced with Nagi. What better way to sneak Sou in than a red herring resembling her daughter? I don't place much faith in this theory. But I've said that before only for a few theories to become increasingly likely, so I might as well add another notch to the conspiracy corkboard. And if Sou is an antagonist, Mini Michi has actually been a major obstacle to Michi as much as she's helped.
• Anyway! The 3rd hint: Tear herself isn't haunted. Maybe that's as simple as no spirit being attached to her at the moment, but it tracks with Nagi only hurting Ange and Non. For unexplained reasons Tear has been spared any direct damage, despite suffering heavily as a bystander. What do these hints tell us? I'unno. So much for the "answer section" of the manga. Karasuma's still keeping her secrets close to chest and nothing in Tear's life gets to make sense anymore. But they're important pieces to a puzzle we lost the illustration for. We know vaguely where they fit but we're just going to have to wait on that full picture. And that's the fun of a good mystery.

I can't get enough of the bittersweetness surrounding Nagi. The fear that, as much as DeLphi loves her, she hates them enough to want them dead. I don't want to believe it either but the threat is there. Enough to make Tear suspect it and force the conversation away. There's so much left to learn about Nagi, and maybe we have her right here for questioning?

Another confusing detail: Tear's search for Ange didn't work. It's safe to pin significance on this - it's some kind of spiritual jamming that only the AAA star narrowly broke through. Two powerful forces with a mind of their own at play, one we can't even begin to outline. What is covering for Nagi?
(AAA star looking an awful lot like an MA again. Sayaka wrote it backwards like she thinks Aizawa tops. Stupid Sayaka-senpai.)

Very minor detail but Tear's mother was wearing a pale yellow dress the day she committed suicide. Yellow is Honami's color. A dash of tragic theming there? Back in ch12's discussion, Perfect Yellow, I touched on how yellow is a delicate and temperamental color. It's associated with brightness and hope, like sunshine. But also decay, of bruises and rotting flesh. It's the caution sign. In The Yellow Wallpaper by Gilman it signifies a family and mind falling apart from better days, in the King in Yellow by Chambers it is both regal and grotesque. It comes up a lot in horror, and psychologically yellow is a tough color to get right. The wrong shade of it, the wrong lighting even, can turn something pretty into something repulsive. I don't know how conscious Dorothy was of this but it's perfectly emblematic for Honami's frightfully unknowable nature.

"Sayaka-senpai snuck into school to do some stuff." Maybe it's less funny if you can't follow along, but I love Dorothy's pathetic recaps that poke fun at how hard the manga can be to follow or describe. Chapter 36 is, in fact, the start of volume 7. Normally I'd speculate more on what that means for the rest of the volume; past volumes were constructed like standalone episodes and set up most of the volume's plot points in that first chapter.

But, as the story's grown, that structure has slipped away from Dorothy. This Tear flashback was meant to end in chapter 35, yet kept going since Dorothy needed to give it more space. Ch33-34, the rise and fall of DeLphi, were originally one long chapter. The story is taking on a life of its own and I understand Dorothy's anxiety over not knowing how long that will take to tell in full. But the quality of these chapters keeps rising. Effortlessly bringing background characters into main character roles, re-contextualizing not just the story but the tone of the manga in this turning point, and a seismic shift waiting in Michi becoming an active protagonist. I loved this little flashback and I'm just as excited for it to be over.

Thanks for the chapter! Personally I think it should be TearNeo…

I am shaking in my seat because I want to know what happens next, and I can’t wait for Michi’s reaction to all of this

Everyone in the story knows different pieces of information (even if Michi’s piece of information is buried in lost memories), and I’m so excited to see this group piece together everything and hopefully prevent any more deaths

i'm loving how now we have the two most important sources of mysteries very clear in our sights: whatever happened to Michi when she was younger, and Nagi's whole deal
They get intertwined due to Aizawa becoming friends with Michi and turns everything into a much more convoluted and confusing mess, but essentially those two are the very roots of all the issues now
i wonder how will we begin to understand more about the origins and about untangling the messy way in which they've mixed up together...

Thank you for the chapter update!!

delicious NeoTear chapter
also poor Ange, possessed non-stop doing messed up stuff and then immediately choked out by some suspicious fan woman, girl can't catch a break

Thank you for the TL and recap! I desperately need these every time. Honestly, a reread might be necessary.

Karasuma's unintentional ikkemen nature truly steals every frame she's in when she's not saying some stupid shit. (I mean, her face in this page alone... Tear, pass the controller...) And then she says some stupid shit. I love her badly. Possibly the best balance between the despairing parts of this manga and the light-hearted parts.

Thank you for the TL and recap like always grateful for all your hardwork >^<)

I don't think y life's ever making sense again.

Oh, Tear. There are perfectly, I mean mostly sane girls who see ghosts. But you decided to get involved with the wrong one if you wanted your life to make sense.

Or, in my opinion, you might have gotten involved with the right one.

Welcome to this side, Tear-sama! :D

i'm loving how now we have the two most important sources of mysteries very clear in our sights: whatever happened to Michi when she was younger, and Nagi's whole deal
They get intertwined due to Aizawa becoming friends with Michi and turns everything into a much more convoluted and confusing mess, but essentially those two are the very roots of all the issues now
i wonder how will we begin to understand more about the origins and about untangling the messy way in which they've mixed up together...

Maybe they are even caused by the same thing. I have no idea what, but it would make sense for the narrative to resolve both mysteries at once. Though it could also be that, since we recently didn't focus on michi as much, the plot thread of her past will be picked up after dealing with the nagi mystery.