Have you ever wondered if life, the cosmos, or whatever you believe in, has a plan for you? If you're conscious and over, say, 16, I'd say you probably have.
The central idea behind the Livingstone manga is that, yes, every soul has a plan. This differs significantly from a "life" plan, as a soul plan can span across several lifetimes. When you deviate from your soul's plan, your psycholithe, basically a stone that contains your soul, can shatter and leave behind wicked, evil feelings that can taint an area and affect the soul plans of others nearby. The story's protagonists, Sakurai and Amano, exist to save psycholithes whenever possible, and if not, then to clean up the fragments of the psycholithes to prevent further damage.
This isn't really a new concept for supernatural/paranormal manga. The idea that areas carry negative energy, and that things like murder, suicide, or sudden accidental death can compound that negative energy, is really common. I haven't seen a lot of "clean-up crews" for this kind of energy, so that's why I picked this one up.
The characters of Sakurai and Amano are complete opposites of one another. Sakurai is a straight-laced, professional whose job is to basically convince people not to go against their soul's plan. Amano is a bit childish and impulsive, and he frequently pushes people in the opposite direction of Sakurai since it doesn't matter to him whether souls get to reincarnate or not. This might be because Amano isn't even of human origin, whereas Sakurai is (though it's not really explained in the first volume). I didn't really find their "odd couple" dynamic to be endearing, but their out-of-syncness was different and unusual. I did not get the feeling that Sakurai and Amano were ever going to come to a grudging understanding/respect for one another in the next two volumes.
The art for this manga wasn't very good. The artist, Kouji Seo, is known for hit series such as Suzuka and Fuuka, so I suspect that this three-volume manga was just a filler-project for him. It wasn't bad art, just not especially good. It could also be that, because the story itself is about things that aren't visually or psychologically appealing, neither is the art.
The stories were hard to read, too. Sometimes they were funny, or the author tried to inject a little humor into the scenes to lighten them up, but more often than not, they were emotionally uncomfortable. The things that cause a psycholithe to shatter are traumatic, horrible events, and part of the clean-up process involves Sakurai reading (and viewing) these events. If you are even slightly the squeamish type, I strongly recommend avoiding this manga.
Overall, I can't really say that this was a great manga or one that I would recommend to a lot of people. Clearly I wasn't the right audience for it, but I couldn't really get a sense of what the ideal audience would be. This was only the first volume, too, so it's possible that the author hadn't really formed a clear idea of what the story was going to be when it was published, but it didn't show enough potential for me to want to continue the remaining two.
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