Is Dissolving Classroom Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Yuuma Azawa worships the Devil, and his apologies have a horrifying side effect: they liquefy the brains of anyone who hears them, while his compliments leave people grotesquely disfigured. His younger sister Chizumi is somehow even more destructive, leaving tragedy wherever she goes. The two drift through a series of loosely connected chapters — a high school, a dating scene, an apartment complex, a televised manhunt — leaving a trail of melted, disfigured victims behind them, building toward a broadcast apology that threatens to take out everyone watching.

Where it falls short

This is one of Ito's more divisive works, and it's easy to see why. The "apology melts your brain" conceit is a genuinely weird, almost darkly comedic idea on paper, but the execution leans harder into repetition than escalation — once you understand the rule, most chapters play out the same basic beat without finding many new angles on it. Chizumi in particular is more of a chaos agent than a character, and the sibling dynamic that's supposed to anchor the book never develops much beyond "these two are bad news." It's also a notably uneven read tonally, swinging between body horror and genuinely odd comedic touches in a way that doesn't always land the way it seems to want to.

What it does well

Underneath the repetition, there's a real satirical idea here about the empty theater of public apology in Japanese media culture, and when that satire is sharp — particularly the climactic broadcast apology sequence — it's some of the more purely strange, memorable imagery Ito has put to page. The disfigurement body horror itself is as visually unsettling as you'd expect from him, rendered with the same meticulous detail that makes his best work so effective. For readers who already know his range, it's a genuinely interesting look at him working in a stranger, more satirical register than usual.

Verdict

This isn't the Ito you hand to someone as an introduction, and it's not among his strongest work, but it's a weird, memorable curiosity for readers who already love his style and want to see him take a genuine swing at something different, even if it doesn't fully land.