Haruka has it rough. She moves to a school in the countryside due to her dad's family getting a new job and gets tormented every day by a group of bullies. Her family and a boy named Aiba seem to be the only traces of happiness in her life, but will this happiness last?

Hepatica is a brutal depiction of middle school bullying and the cruelty of children. The torment Haruka goes through ranges from regular verbal abuse, being pushed into garbage, and the event which kicks off the revenge plot of the entire manga: her house gets burned down with her family. This is the final nail that turns Haruka from an innocent school girl to a cold-blooded vigilante.
The children in this manga are so twisted not even the puppy killers from Elfen lied or the cast of Narutaru felt this vile. They bully Haruka extensively for the sole fact she’s an outsider and even after her family dies, they taunt her over it. I’m usually not a fan of revenge stories because the victim turns into a perpetrator, but the bullies here deserved every bit of suffering they received. Never has the murder of middle school students been so glorious.

Some readers might find it hard to digest that children could even be this sadistic and I do admit that the events are a bit overblown, but some children out there are fully capable of being psychopathic monsters. What doesn’t help is when the teacher enables the bullying and even seems to be afraid of her own students. Even Aiba, Haruka’s only friend, shows to have a hidden dark side that comes into play during the final chapters. As we read on, we find that some of the bullies have their own troubled lives they want to escape from. This in no way excuses or lessens their behavior, but it does show how a cycle of bullying is created.

I give Hepatica a 7.5/10. The character drama resonated with me and I rooted for Haruka the entire way. The plot twist near the end genuinely left me shocked and the final pages were heartbreakingly brutal. Reading this was similar to how I felt after reading Metamorphosis by ShindoL. My only complaints are that the art can feel too rough/ amateurish at times and the story can verge into juvenile edge territories. Surprisingly enough, this is a josei manga which makes it the first manga I’m reviewing here for a female audience.