Box of Light is set around a curious little convenience store, one that people only seem to find when they're on the brink. Writer and artist Seiko Erisawa spends the first two chapters on people who find their way in through different circumstances. Misaki is an overworked executive or office drone on the verge of total collapse. Yuuto's an indecisive young man who had a fall while hiking alone. Also, he feels distant from his energetic younger sister, but I don't think Erisawa folded those two aspects together very well.
Erisawa expands on the store and its employees further from there. Kokura is the guy falling to his death at the top of this post. Now he's somewhere between human and something else, but he's alive, just as long as he's employed by the store. That becomes an issue when the mysterious manager announces they'll be shifting to self-checkout in Chapter 4.
Chapter 4 is also focused on the other employee, Tahini. He's a "spectre" and is using this job to study humans, their lives and death, for something to do with the energy they release at death. Erisawa hints that there are corporations in the afterlife, or whatever dimension Tahini and the store hail from, and at least one of them considers his research a potential problem.
Erisawa's characters wear a half-lidded, drowsy appearance most of the time. Like everyone, even the characters that aren't human, are in a fog. Or that, bizarre as this is, it's just a job and they're going through the motions. It could add impact for when characters do get frightened or excited, simply as contrast, but I'm not sure it works. Kokura seems as though he's supposed to be more emotional and expressive than Tahini (even if he claims he can read Tahini's expressions easily), but he seems just as bored most of the time.
Kokura's chapter suggests he's distanced himself from the regular people in his life since his accident, or tried to before someone he knew entered the store, but since this volume doesn't return to his regular life after that chapter, it's hard to tell if anything changed in his attitude. Tahini only gets excitable about the cat he's sort of created from the living darkness that surrounds the store and will eat people if they aren't careful or hang around too long. I assume there's a difference between that and someone getting what they need and moving on, but it's not clear.
Two more employees join the staff in the back half of volume 1, and they're more excitable and bubbly, which acts as comic relief, but. . .The comic sticks to small panels, and the occasional use of larger panels for reaction shots works to give things some room and scale, so maybe being a bit freer with that would help.
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