Paru Itagaki is back in very familiar-but-not-quite territory with Taika’s Reason, a new manga that once again puts animal people, social pressure, and murder mystery into one very uncomfortable blender.
If you know Itagaki from Beastars, the surface-level comparison is obvious. That series built its drama around anthropomorphic carnivores and herbivores living together, with romance, class tension, and a killing sitting at the centre of the story. Taika’s Reason also deals with animal people and death, but the setup is different enough that it does not sound like a simple Beastars remix.
This time, humans are still part of the world. The key concept is a “humanisation” process, where pets can be transformed into human-like animal people. In the story, this process exists as a response to falling birth rates and population decline.
The main character, Ao Minami, is against the idea, and so is her father. Their family dog, a pitbull named Taika, is deeply loved by both of them. Then Ao comes home and finds her father dead, with Taika nearby and blood on his muzzle. Her father had previously warned her about animals “going wild” and being euthanised after becoming uncontrollable, so Ao panics. Rather than lose Taika too, she hides her father’s body in a river and chooses to put Taika through the humanisation process.
From there, things get morally messy fast.
Once Taika becomes an animal-person, he is not behaving like a mindless danger. He even suggests that he and Ao should turn themselves in, seemingly without fully understanding what that would mean. Ao refuses and tries to work out whether Taika actually killed her father, but the answer is not clear. Before long, Taika ends up attending school alongside Ao while the mystery continues to hang over them.
That mystery looks like the main hook of the first volume: who really killed Ao’s father, why it happened, and whether someone else knows what Ao did afterwards. There is also the question of whether Ao herself is in danger.
School adds another layer of tension. Taika is not the only humanised pet there. Other dogs and cats are present too, including Tsunayoshi Seki, a humanised German Shepherd who used to be a police dog. Tsunayoshi is in the same class as Taika, Ao, and his master Tatsunari, and he quickly becomes a rival figure. That competitive energy also connects to Taika’s protective instinct toward Ao.
The manga also appears to explore bullying and discrimination. Ao and Taika both face harassment, and Tsunayoshi at one point seems to suggest that humans may not be trustworthy. For readers who liked how Beastars used animal society to talk about prejudice, instinct, and power, this is probably the part to watch.
There is also a romantic or mating-related angle, though it sounds intentionally awkward. Taika was originally Ao’s pet, and after becoming humanised, he shows interest in being her mate and worries whether Ao’s classmate Yoichi has similar intentions. Based on the source description, the manga presents these moments as uncomfortable rather than straightforwardly romantic.
Analysis: For Malaysia and SEA manga readers, the interesting part here is not just “new work from the Beastars creator.” It is that Taika’s Reason seems to push Itagaki’s favourite themes into a more direct human-versus-humanised-animal setup. That could make the moral questions sharper, especially because the story mixes family grief, school drama, animal instinct, and social distrust instead of staying inside a fully animal society.
Taika’s Reason Volume 1 is available via Viz Media, while Volume 2 is scheduled to appear on September 15, 2026.