Story three, "Daughter," provides a good instance of Akino's basic storytelling strategy. It concerns a couple named Hayward who come to the shop looking for a pet to ease their suffering after the death of their daughter, Alice. When D takes them into the back to show a pet he's sure will meet their needs, the two see what appears to be a young girl resembling their late child. It's not a child, D corrects them, it's a rabbit: "a rare species that almost died out on a deserted island off the coast of Australia." The couple takes the pet home, after hearing the rules for pet care ("Do not show her to anyone. Burn the incense you receive on a daily basis. Feed her fresh water and vegetables only.") Of course, they quickly break them.

One of the themes of the series appears to be that the way we treat our companion animals reflects on us in ways we don't realize. The doting Haywards, we learn, were incapable of imposing any discipline on their daughter. It was this abdication of parental responsibility that contributed to the young girl's death. Once their "pet" ingratiates itself into the family, they settle into the same pattern: letting her have chocolates and not stopping her when she begins gorging on sweets. The creature goes berserk and then undergoes a gory transformation that ultimately results in Dad Hayward being devoured and the city attacked by a rapidly multiplying army of killer bunnies. (Fetch the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!) There's a great scene of kids in the park being surrounded by the cottontailed killers, but Akino changes scenes before the carnage begins.

Silly? Sure. But behind the Night of the Lepus kitschiness lurks a serious theme: in the end, the Haywards' inadequate "love" destroys both their daughter and their pet. Which brings us back to the blended themes that I noted earlier.

Akino, as I've noted, doesn't stint on grue when it's appropriate (among the other images in volume one: a partially-devoured bird-person and a man mauled by a Doberman), though a lot of her art follows the more "feminine" conventions of teen-girl manga. Two of the stories feature sad-eyed ingenue heroines who are regularly rendered with flowers or bubbles decorating the panels. Akino's pages are less rigorously tiered than, say, Junji Ito's are in Uzumaki (good thing Pet Shop wasn't one of the first books I picked to read in the "100% Authentic Manga" format), which contributes to the series' mildly off-kilter moodiness.