Inuyashiki

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A manga created by Hiroya Oku (yes, he of Gantz and Hen fame) that ran between 2014 and 2017. It was published on Kodansha's Evening. It has an anime adaptation in 2017 released in the famous block NoitaminA, and a live-action film adaption premiered April 20, 2018.

Ichiro Inuyashiki is a 58-year old man with teenage children who has no friends and isn't treated very well by his own family. Suddenly, one day, he discovers he has stomach cancer in a terminal stage. Desperate and incapable of telling his family about the fact (even fearing that, at the end, they will not care), he is suddenly struck by a lighting-like phenomenon caused by aliens. The aliens rebuild Inuyashiki and a young man who was also hit by the lightning, trying to cover their tracks, but only manage to rebuild them using mechanical bodies, although their memories intact.

Though initially unaware of what happened, Inuyashiki soon discovers what happened to him, but it is still unsure what to do with his life now that he is basically a human robot. But what happened to the young man?

Tropes used in Inuyashiki include:
  • A Million Is a Statistic: Soon Shishiro begins to rationalize comitting murder as something not very important as long the victims aren't people he knows.
  • Creepy Monotone: Shishiro voices don't raises or is altered at all while killing people. He is always a midly joyful tone.
  • Dude, Where's My Respect?: Considering he sustains the whole family and is shown to be nothing but a loving father and husband, the family's harsh treatment of Ichiro counts as a downplayed version of this.
  • Evil Counterpart: Hiro to Ichiro, big time, which Ichiro lampshades(and laments) almost immediately after meeting the first in Chapter 13. One a nice, married older man, the other a sociopathic, single younger man. Both with the same powers and similar names.
  • Foreshadowing: Chapter 10. When the audience barely knows Hiro, Andou asks off-handedly if he is gonna kill him after he shows to him he is a cyborg. Turns out Ando was perfectly justified in expecting that from his friend.
  • Hikkikomori: Andou is one, having isolated himself because he was being bullied.
  • Loss of Identity: Ichiro no longer believes he's the real Ichiro once he discovers his new mechanic nature, at first. Once he begins to save people, he feels he is still as human as ever.
  • Older Than He Looks: Life has been rough on Ichiro, or at least that's how his doctor sees him. It don't helps he was a father in his 40s, making his daughter looks like his granddaughter.
  • Power Perversion Potential: Shishigami uses the power of his cyborg body to hijack communications to make a pornographic image appears all over the screens of a store.
  • They Look Just Like Everyone Else: Shishiro looks incredibly average, to the point you could look at pictures of him and Mari blindly and think they're a couple on a romance manga. Oooh boy.
  • Tomato in the Mirror: It don't takes much time for Inuyashiki to discover he's basically a robot with a human mind inside it.
  • We Can Rebuild Him: The aliens do this to the victims of an accident they caused, though to such a point it's hard to call them cyborgs, as they're basically mechanical with memories of their biological selves.
  • Undying Loyalty: Hanako always runs back to Ichiro, since she's a dog after all.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Zig-zagged with the aliens that gave Hiro and Ichiro their powers. They give both a very nice person and a horrible one super-powers, so they simultaneously cause good and bad things to happen to several people; people are saved, and people die because of them. At the end, however, giving Hiro a robotic body allows him to save the Earth of a meteor that would extinguish all human life, so the aliens untimely invert this trope.
  • The Ugly Guy's Hot Daughter: Mari is gorgeous, her parents, specially Ishiro, not so much. Part of that may be explained by their ages.
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Shishiro turns into a serial killer not too soon after getting powers that make him super-human.
  • Zettai Ryouiki: Mari's school uniform hits a D.