Ikigami

Ikigami The Ultimate Limit, is a new manga series written and drawn by Motoro Mase, published by Viz. The clean art style on display in Ikigami brings to mind another mature reader manga, Battle Royale, but while Ikigami has mature reader's content, it's nowhere near as intense or graphic as Battle Royale (and that's more than okay). An Ikigami is a death note that the government randomly assigns to a person who will then die in twenty-four hours. As it is explained to the people whose stories are told in Ikigami, this is done to make the population at large come to better appreciate how important life is and to not take it for granted. This premise, to me, is a little shaky, but once you accept it, it does make for a wide range of engaging (and often intense) stories. The other attraction of Ikigami is that unlike most manga series that run the span of several volumes following the same cast of characters, each volume of Ikigami (there's two out so far) are comprised of several short stories of how different people react to being told they only have twenty-four hours to live.