Four stars. The title apparently means “unnecessary” in Turkish.

This is Furuya’s latest series, finished six years ago, after his fan-favorite (at least for this fan of his) Saltiness. As usual, the story follows a man in the fringes of society, the owner of a small shop that specializes on baumkuchen, a type of pastry I wasn’t aware of but that looks delicious. As a teen, the man was urged to quit high school and become an apprentice of his father’s. Now his father is dead, and he has found himself as a nearly forty-year-old dude who knows little else other than baumkuchen, and whom nobody would love. His sole acquaintance is his twenty-three-year-old employee, an intimidating young woman who regularly pesters him with random topics such as the birth of the universe. She also finds him weak and generally pathetic.

One day, our protagonist begs his employee to eat out with him, and she reluctantly agrees because it’s his birthday. He has realized that he leads an empty life, but he opens up about the fact that he has fallen in love. The employee fears that she’s the target. However, that’s not the case: every evening, when he’s returning from work, he sees the same shapely young woman standing behind a tree at a local park, and she’s alluring enough that he can’t stop fantasizing about her, even though he has never seen her face.

The protagonist’s employee is intrigued. She urges him to head to that park and introduce himself to the woman. As he points the stranger out to his employee, though, an issue arises: he’s the only person who can see her.

That’s as much as you need to know about this shortish series, which only gets increasingly bizarre from there. Although it’s a minor work by a now fifty-one-year-old author who has probably said most of what he needed to say, it delves into powerful topics such as the need of certain people to lose themselves in delusions, because if they faced their reality objectively, they’d go insane.

I enjoyed this tale a lot, and found its last stretch quite touching. However, I would have ended it a page or two earlier.

I have reviewed most other works of this author, such as Boku to Issho, Wanitokagegisu, Himizu, and Ciguatera. Unfortunately, I have only found the translation for a single more work of his, and it’s the oldest, made in the early 90s. Furuya hasn’t produced any original work in six years, although he seems to have involved himself in adaptations of his series such as a live-action version of Ciguatera, which I’m sure is lackluster because live-action stuff rarely works.