My favorite "psychological" titles

If I could only recommend 5 manga series to anyone, the first 2 are listed in my last 2 posts.

But the next 2 end up getting grouped under the genre of "psychological" thrillers.

1st, Death Note. Since I started reading it, they animated it, then made a bunch of movies. Everyone already knows about it, so I'm not going to say any more. I liked it before it was cool, damn it!

A series I like even more is called Liar Game. (It's also been made into a TV show that's about 95% faithful to the manga...not bad.) Liar Game's hook is that it's a (fairly long now) series of logic puzzle scenarios. I bothered to mention Death Note because if you liked the mental chess that that series banked on, you should love this one 100 times more.

The main character is a girl that's the ultimate in naive. She receives a box containing a million in cash, and an invitation to join "Liar Game." The invitation says something like "Now that you've opened the card, you've already agreed to the terms of this contest." Kind of like Microsoft's TOS agreements.

This contest (first round, anyway) is to see if you can get your opponent's cash. Anything you lose you have to pay back or they sell you into an Arabic harem. Of course the story begins with her losing it all by handing it over to the other player.

Then she enlists the aid of a genius "swindler" who has just been released from prison, in order to get her money back and save herself from a future with Steven Seagal. This guy even looks like the evil bastard in Death Note. I know what hair style to get Japanese people to think I'm cool, but also a genius.

The first round is pretty elementary, actually, but the fun doesn't end there (it still hasn't ended, actually.) There are many much more complicated games from there on, with many more players. Each one is structured to let the reader try and work out how he'd attack the problem. Then you see various characters try different strategies and the problem is shown from all angles.

The TV show is a little different from the book, but not greatly. Some of the characters were re-vamped, and one of the games was solved differently, but if you like live-action Japanese TV in all it's super overly dramatic glory, check it out.