Fairy Cube, Volume 1 by Kaori Yuki

Ian is a young man who believes in fairies, even if no one else around him does. He remembers his mother having green hair and red eyes, and his father saying that his mother seemed like a fairy to him. But now his mother is gone, and his father, once an award-winning novelist, has been reduced to teaching in school to make a living.

But a chance encounter with Rin, once Ian's childhood friend, brings him back to remembering how much he loved fairies. Rin and her parents had moved away from Ian when Rin was younger, but now Rin and Ian rediscover Ian's belief in fairies.

But something else is happening. Ian keeps having glimpses of a green-haired, red-eyed boy near his father, and people are dying in the city with their blood spattered across their bodies and backs in a pattern much like fairy wings. One day, Ian stumbles across just such a body and witnesses a one-eyed man pick up something from the body. Ian follows him into a shop and discovers that the man is the proprietor of the shop, and he was picking up a crystal cube with an insect inside it.

Unnerved by the man and the shop, Ian flees, but before he goes, the man gives him another cube with a little green lizard with red eyes inside it. He warns Ian against losing it or throwing it away, telling him he will be cursed forever if he does so. Ian doesn't know what to do, but keeps it anyway.

Later the next day, Ian is stabbed in the back by his father over an argument about fairies. He finds himself dying, and his spirit is stranded outside his body, but his body comes back to life, animated from within by the spirit of his brother, the spirit boy with the green hair and red eyes he has been seeing around his father.

With nowhere else to go, Ian returns to the shop, needing help to regain his body. The proprietor tells Ian it is true that he helped Ian's brother, Tokage, take over his body, because he and Tokage had a deal. But now he can help Ian.

Their deal-making is interrupted by the arrival of another fairy, this one female, named Ainsel, She looks much more like a traditional fairy, being small and female and delicate, with wings. But she hates humans and tries to attack Ian for being too close to the one she loves, the proprietor of the shop, Kaito. But she cannot control her magical power and begins destroying the shop, so Kaito sends her and Ian into the Otherworld to save his shop.

Here, Ian can once again touch things, which he could not as a spirit. Kaito tells he and Ainsel that because he had to act quickly, he does not know where he put them in the otherworld, so they will have to make their own way back. Ainsel is unhappy, but she and Ian begin their trek to a portal located beneath an Oak tree. On the way there, they encounter a lost fairy child, who Ian insists on saving. But the child is a trap set by a fairy hunter called a Nucklavee. The child is actually a badger spirit, but Ian doesn't blame the badger for the trap, and he cuts the net the Nucklavee has imprisoned the Badger-spirit's mate in as well as another animal spirit. Ainsel defeats the Nucklavee with her power to help Ian.

Ainsel is stunned that Ian, a human, would go out of his way to help a fairy, and she finds that she doesn't hate him at all. In fact, she would rather help him, for his innocence and goodwill. Once they make it back to Kaito's shop, Ian gets another body to inhabit, since Tokage has Ian's, the body of a much younger boy named Eriya Barrett.

Ian agrees to take over the body to get revenge on Tokage, and now must get Rin to believe who he really is. But Tokage, in his body, is hanging around with Rin an awful lot. Can he get Rin to believe him without revealing the secret of his identity to Tokage? And what about the Fairies plan to eliminate the problem of humans destroying the earth by destroying all humans everywhere? Can he prevent that from happening, or must he allow it to happen to get his revenge on Tokage?

And when the woman who is the grandmother of Eriya Barrett reveals that she also has the gift of fairy sight, how will Ian deal with this sudden complication to his plans?

I rather liked this series, which took on Celtic Fairies with a uniquely japanese twist. It combines fairies of the Celtic mold (like the Nucklavee) and a sort of "crane Maiden" motif of the heavenly (or in this case, fairy) wife who stays with a man but is forced to flee. In this case, she leaves behind a half-human son with the gift of sight and a birthmark of butterfly wings on his back, which his father later burns to take away the reminder of his wife and fairies.

Ian, though, pays the greatest price for this contravention of the rules of men and fairies. Abandoned by his mother, hated by his father, and scorned and shunned by everyone else, he ends up losing his body to Tokage, his twin brother. And yet, with everything that has happened to him, he still has more hardship to face in regards to Rin and Tokage and his mother and fairies. But how will it change him?

I can't wait to read more of this series, and it seems Ian will have some hard choices to make in the time ahead.