Originally published in 2015, Voynich Hotel is a 3 volume manga revolving around a hotel on the second-tiniest island in the world. A very strange little island, with a myth - or is it - about three sister witches who died trying to drive off the conquistadors centuries ago.
We're introduced to the story through Taizou, who seems like a fairly pleasant, fairly bland young man with a head for numbers on vacation. From there, Seiman introduces the two maids (Helena, seen above, and Berna) who work at the hotel, the suicidal cook, a group of kids playing detective and investigating a serial killer loose on the island, a series of hitmen, three girls growing weed, and so on, and so on.
The characters' stories end up interconnected to various degrees. The plot about the girls dealing weed never really crosses over with the kid detectives, for example, but it does cross over with the hitmen. The hitmen cross over with both the demon and the serial killer.
The one thread that does run the whole way through is Helena, who develops a crush on Taizou. So Seiman spends some chapters on dates, but as Taizou's past emerges, so does Helena's. I'm not sure how I feel about the relationship, because while Helena is considerably older than Taizou, she doesn't really look it. Strictly from a visual perspective, it makes me uneasy.
The recurring theme seems to be love, and what people will do for those they love. Not just Helena and Taizou, but also Helena towards her sisters, and the serial killer towards her kid sister. The answer isn't always pretty, and some times the sacrifices made are wasted, but in other cases things turn out all right.
That makes the book sound grim and serious, but it's more darkly comic. Seiman likes to add visual references to the work, like a robot detective based on the robot detective in some other manga (Kikaider, maybe), though his abilities are limited and treated mostly as a joke. In one panel, a character does the dramatic pointing posture Scott Pilgrim does on the first volume of his comic. Helena tries to measure Taizou's temperature by placing her forehead against his, then decries herself for doing something so cliched no manga artist would use it. Except Mitsuru Adachi, apparently. Must be in volume 7 of Cross Game, because I haven't seen it in there so far.
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