Is The Ichinose Family's Deadly Sins Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

A car crash leaves all six members of the Ichinose family with amnesia on the same night. They wake up in the hospital, go home, and start trying to piece their lives back together — except it becomes clear almost immediately that whatever they're about to remember, somebody in this family would rather they didn't. Taizan 5 builds the whole manga around that one structural trick: everyone in the house has a secret, the reader finds out about them roughly as fast as the characters do, and the family itself is the mystery.

It's a premise that could easily tip into gimmick, and the manga doesn't totally avoid that, but it's a genuinely fun engine for a thriller. You're never sure which relative to trust, which is exactly the point.

What it does well

The structure is the best thing about it. Because nobody remembers anything, every scene can plausibly be hiding something, and Taizan 5 uses that to keep tension high without resorting to constant cliffhangers. Small details — a look that lasts a beat too long, a question nobody answers directly — do a lot of the work, and the manga trusts the reader to notice them.

It also doesn't treat its six-person cast as interchangeable. Each family member's secret says something different about them, and the grandparents' generation gets just as much weight as the siblings, which a lot of family-mystery stories skip past. The art keeps pace with the tone too — clean, legible character acting that can still turn unsettling fast when a scene needs it to.

Most of all, it's efficient. There's no arc here that exists just to buy time; the manga is clearly building toward its ending from very early on, and if you like a thriller that doesn't waste your time getting there, this delivers.

Where it falls short

The tradeoff for all that efficiency is depth. With six people's backstories to unpack in six volumes, some of them get resolved in what amounts to a page or two of exposition rather than a real scene, and a couple of the secrets end up feeling more like plot devices than character beats. The mystery also isn't always fair — a few of the bigger reveals depend on information you had no real way to piece together yourself, so it reads more like shock delivery than a puzzle you could've solved.

The ending is the clearest place this shows. After volumes of careful escalation, the final volume resolves faster than the buildup promised, and a couple of threads get tied off in a way that feels more like the series needed to land the plane than like the natural conclusion of everything that came before.

Verdict

If you want a dark, fast, slightly pulpy family-secrets thriller that respects your time, this is a solid pick — just go in knowing the ending cashes out quicker than the setup deserves. It's a good weekend read, not a classic of the genre.