Five stars. The title translates to “Delicious in Dungeon.”

Two long-running manga series that I had been following for a long time ended this month: the first one, Oshimi’s Chi no Wadachi, and the second one is Kui’s wonderful Dungeon Meshi. More often than not, when I finish a manga series and I’m starving for more of the peculiar joys that this format provides (far higher joys than what most of Western fiction produces these days), I check out lists of recommendations, plenty of which mentioned Dungeon Meshi. However, I always passed on it. You see, a fiction genre somewhat popular in Japan focuses on weird food-related tournaments that mostly seem like excuses to draw mouth-watering food, and print recipes. I never saw the appeal, and I wasn’t interested in a variation of that formula even with a fantasy dressing.

Big mistake. Dungeon Meshi is an exceptional story with fantastic characters, and the food-making part works as a straight-faced satire, because the vast majority of the recipes involve cooking D&D-like monsters into something resembling edible food. The whole deal about making elaborate food out of monsters could have been a gimmick, but the plot turns it into a necessary element to survive.

The tale introduces a group of adventures who don’t get along with each other very well. The leader, the fighter of the group, is an obsessive, socially oblivious maniac (could easily pass for autistic) who dreams of tasting every monster in the world, and who possibly also wants to become a monster. He’s accompanied by his sister, a laid-back, eccentric sorcerer. Apart from the siblings we have an uptight elven wizard, a pragmatic halfling rogue, and a barbarian dwarf merc.

Regarding the wizard of the group, named Marcille, I must say that I’m a big fan of that whole cute face, blonde hair, braids, and choker business. Love ya Marci.

The world of this story features dungeons as prominent landmarks. At some point in history, otherworldly creatures entered the main reality and settled in underground pockets. Their wild magic created such ecosystems, filled with strange creatures and ingredients, that farming and raiding those dungeons became the backbone of entire societies. Towns have grown around them, and the first levels of those dungeons are frequented by traders and adventurers. The careful lore involving the existence and development of dungeons, as well as the political issues they caused, is one of my favorite parts of the tale (which may not be saying much, as I love most of it).

Anyway, our main group delved into the dungeon for some important reason I forgot about, and in the process, the protagonist’s sister, that laid-back sorcerer, gets eaten by a goddamn dragon. Due to the abundance of strange magic, dungeons are the only places in the world where people don’t fully die (most of the time), and some adventurers have made their trade out of following some other group and then reviving them for a reward. More ruthless groups murder other groups, then revive them for a reward. In any case, our main characters, minus the sorcerer, leave the dungeon defeated.

The barbarian leaves the group for a better paying gig. The main dude, that fighter whose sister is being digested, broke and desperate, decides to delve again into the depths of the dungeon to save his sibling. The uptight wizard will accompany him, because she was friends with the sister, and the rogue decides to follow them as well (I don’t recall why, but likely the promise of profit). They’re broke and can’t afford provisions, so they must survive increasingly dangerous levels by foraging and hunting the local monstrous flora and fauna, which nobody does because it’s a disgusting, horrifying prospect.

I love the concept, but this story mainly triumphs in the execution, thanks to the devoted, meticulous work of the author, a bonafide craftswoman. Lesser stories would have the protagonists win by unleashing vague, convenient powers that would overcome the obstacles, but in this tale, the author puts us right then and there with her characters as they come up with clever ways to succeed. I recall now two instances in particular: they couldn’t pass through an area plagued with carnivorous, urticant vines, so they hunted some nasty frog-like creatures whose skins made them immune to the vines, and then they skinned and wore their hides as uniforms. Dealing with untouchable ghosts, they came up with the notion of making holy water sorbet and turning it into a bludgeoning weapon. The whole story is filled with shit like this; you don’t get many tales in which the protagonists truly earn what they get.

What set out to be a relatively simple tale of a group of people who don’t really get along but who end up liking each other more while trying to achieve something important, turns into a world-endangering quest in which the main characters are bound to save or ruin everything. As things got darker and darker, some of the stuff that happened, particularly the monster designs, reminded me of Berserk (which, for those who don’t know, was, for about three fifths of its run, as “peer into the abyss” as it gets).

The main group gains two new members along the way (a survivalist dwarf and a selfish cat-girl), but they also interact with other organized groups that mainly intend to hinder them. In a story with such a large cast, you could expect some significant development maybe out of the protagonist and someone else, but in this story, every main character gets a satisfying character arc, as well as some of the secondary ones. Even those who could be generally categorized as villains, and would be killed and forgotten in other stories, are treated with care and compassion by the author, who at least makes the readers understand why they’re right from their point of view in pursuing what they want.

After many wild moments and many trials and tribulations, some of which involved the main characters’ deepest pains, the story could have collapsed at the end, but it didn’t. As far as I’m concerned, the climax was brilliantly clever, and the remaining threads are tied up enough, leaving things open-ended in regards to how most of the secondary characters would progress from that point on.

I found the whole thing impeccable, a joy from start to finish. One of the best fantasy stories that I have ever experienced. If you enjoy such a setting at all, particularly if you are into D&D-like stuff, you owe it to yourself to give this a try.

The anime adaptation is in production, and will be released on Netflix. Here’s the latest trailer:

The title translates to either “Blood on the Tracks” or “A Trail of Blood.” Despite the mystery or thriller-like title, this haunting story is about heredity, and how a fucked-up childhood could poison you for the rest of your life. I caught this series maybe three years ago, and read it up to the then latest chapter. This morning I have read the chapter that concluded the tale. I don’t know how to rate the whole.

I hate to review stories that I have read in a chapter-by-chapter release, because my impressions have been muddled and spread thin over time. I will make the effort, though, because I want to think about what this series left in me.

We follow a shy, withdrawn middle schooler who lives with his outwardly normal parents. His dangerously beautiful (and dangerous in general) mother overprotects him, particularly regarding the cousin that visits their home and pesters the protagonist. Although the mother doesn’t want the cousin around, it’s a family member of her husband, so she needs to keep the peace. Growing up, I used to suffer a similar cousin, someone who pushed his way into our home and demanded to be entertained, stealing my time and peace. I had no choice but to deal with the guy because my brother wanted to get along with him.

Anyway, during a mountain trip, the cousin leads our hapless protagonist to the edge of a cliff. His mother, fearing that this clown would end up causing her only son’s demise, finds them both in time to witness how the cousin trips and is about to fall. What follows is a spoiler for the inciting incident of this story, so read it at your peril. The mother hurries to save him, but in the last moment, she allows her intrusive thoughts to win, and pushes the cousin off the cliff.

The cousin survives with severe brain damage that prevents him from pointing an accusatory finger at his aunt, and the protagonist is gaslit into believing that maybe he just imagined the whole thing up, other than the fact that his cousin fell off. The protagonist’s mother unravels, not because she fears the consequences of her murder attempt, but because she may not be punished. She wants it all to break. It seems that she has been miserable forever; she had convinced herself that she ought to get married and a have a child, only to realize that she made a terrible mistake she can’t amend (other than divorcing and moving away, I guess, but she wouldn’t dare). On top of that, she’s the kind of crazy bound to drag everyone around her into ruin.

She despises her husband, whom she resents because he tied her to this miserable life, and instead she searches for intimacy in her son. She entangles him in a somewhat-chaste incestual relationship.

The kid is at times happy that this beautiful mother whose love he yearns for is treating him so warmly, but the rest of the time he feels smothered and creeped out, and wishes to escape. Most of the memorable moments of this tale involve a childhood love of the protagonist, a girl with a differently fucked-up home life, who could end up saving him from a mother that won’t allow any competitors.

As the story progressed, I wanted the protagonist to break free from his mother’s clutches and build a better life with this sweet girl who somewhat inexplicably wished to share her life with him. However, as I thought that the story was approaching its end, the author executed a turning point that sealed the fate of all the characters involved. I won’t go into details, because they would be massive spoilers, but the author forced an unlikely encounter and undid most of the protagonist’s character development. Shortly after, the story moves into a timeskip and makes you realize that the lack of mobile phones and the internet during the story up to that point wasn’t a stylistic choice.

The protagonist, now an adult in his mid-to-late thirties, deals with what remains, both physically and mentally, of his aging, miserable parents, partly hoping that before those two candles are spent, he’ll get enough of those relationships to either assuage his despair about how life treated him, or push him over the edge so he finally dares to kill himself. What I got out of that final block of the story is that some people end up so broken by nature and/or nurture that the most they can aspire for is a quiet place in which to be themselves. I had already realized that before I read this series, though.

(That reminds me of Nick Drake’s lovely song Place to Be, quite apropos:

When I was young, younger than before
I never saw the truth hanging from the door
And now I’m older, see it face to face
And now I’m older, gotta get up, clean the place

And I was green, greener than the hill
Where flowers grow and the sun shone still
Now I’m darker than the deepest sea
Just hand me down, give me a place to be)

Oshimi has created some of the most psychologically twisted mangas I’ve ever read: The Flowers of Evil, Inside Mari, Happiness, as well as this story I’m reviewing. He has also pushed out a couple of duds like Drifting Net Café and Welcome Back, Alice, with which I likely shouldn’t have bothered. In Chi no Wadachi he went further by distorting the world according to the protagonist’s disturbed mental states; for example, when he ends up hollowed out and hopeless, we experience his world as sparse sketches. Plenty of compelling drawings.

Did Oshimi succeed in writing a satisfying ending to this troublesome tale? I’m not sure. The first half was far more compelling, and I would have been more comfortable with the remainder if he hadn’t undone his protagonist’s development to twist the plot into a turning point. Still, I’m not going to forget this story, nor the protagonist’s hauntingly nuts mother, any time soon.

Three and a half stars.

The author of this series, Naoki Urasawa, created 20th Century Boys, one of the classics despite how convoluted it became by the end. In addition he also made Monster, for which he’s likely more acclaimed, but to be honest I have twice failed to get through the opening chapters of that series; along with its expository dialogue, Urasawa’s view of the world, as depicted through his narrative choices, irks me.

There’s a moment in 20th Century Boys in which a spunky teen girl stops a murderous gang war by scolding the participants. This happens in an otherwise very serious narrative. And the mindset behind such a narrative choice, which I could call a pollyanna perspective, pops up relatively often in his stories: people who hate others for reasonable motives suddenly flip and forgive the culprits to the extent of crying for them. Bad people tend to be forgiven even though they caused the deaths of numerous innocents. The good guys should also never kill anybody, because killing is bad, although keeping those people alive causes further deaths in the future.

His series Monster starts with what’s supposed to be a shocking moment of moral corruption or whatever: a Turkish immigrant laborer in Germany has his surgery delayed because the mayor comes in with an injury. The author treats this as an abhorrent development, particularly because the first guy was a stereotypically-depicted downtrodden person. In a heavy-handed manner, I was supposed to feel outrage at this injustice. Sorry, if I’m awaiting surgery for any of my many problems, and suddenly Elon Musk gets wheeled in first because he needs emergency surgery, I would understand even if I would curse at the heavens. Elon Musk’s decisions affect far more people than I do, and so would a mayor’s than a random laborer’s.

Anyway, this series I’m reviewing is a homage to one of the most memorable arcs (apparently) of Osamu Tezuka’s legendary Astro Boy, from back in the sixties. It has nothing to do with Pluto the planet; it refers instead to the Roman god of mortality. The story takes place in an optimistic future in which most societies have become super advanced and have created robot servants. Some of those robots, particularly the cutting-edge ones, could easily be confused for humans. Our protagonist, one of those advanced robots, works as an investigator for Europol. He faces a string of murders in which the victims are both humans and robots, and a robot may be responsible. Due to the laws of robotics, lifted straight from Isaac Asimov, that’s not supposed to happen.

What follows is a thriller that could have been far more compelling. Urasawa is a masterful plotter, but often as subtle as a jackhammer, and he abuses moments in which he’s about to reveal something important only to leave us in a cliffhanger. I don’t recall any other manga author that has been making thrillers with that sort of Western flavor, and I’m grateful, because to me it feels cheap.

The story is interesting, has good stakes and intriguing characters, but for me it fails mainly in the execution and the worldbuilding. Regarding the execution, apart from the points mentioned before, it goes for sentimentality that doesn’t hit the right notes as far as my black heart is concerned, and the worldbuilding in regards to how those robots are built and what they’re capable of doing sounds more like magic than technology. A couple of moments grasped at intriguing psychological insights regarding how both robots and humans are puppets; in the case of humans, because we’re manipulated and compelled to act based on emotions that are mostly out of our control. There were also interesting parallels with early 2000s history: alternate versions of the US and Iraq play a role in the narrative, and plenty of the characters were involved in an alternate version of the war between both nations, including the notion that this alternate Iraq may have developed weapons of mass destruction.

A high-quality anime adaptation is in the works, to be released on the Netflix platform. Here’s the trailer:

Four and a half stars.

I’ll get to see you every time I watch it. No matter how many times I forget you, I’ll remember you again and again.

This is a one-shot manga created by the deranged author of Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man, as well as plenty of other one-shots. Regarding Fujimoto, as it pertains to this story, you should know that the guy is a cinephile who would have rather been an animator than a manga author. In fact, when he got around to coming up with Chainsaw Man, he had become so disillusioned that he intended it to be his last tale, one in which he would go nuts and give zero shits about whether others enjoyed it. Turns out that Chainsaw Man became a worldwide sensation, which has chained Fujimoto into making more manga, starting with a sequel of sorts to his megahit (which may have been a bad idea; I’m not enamoured with it so far).

Anyway, the protagonist of this one-shot I’m reviewing is a middle school kid who is tasked by his mother with the grim duty of recording the last stage of her illness, right up until the moment of her death. The author depicts most of the panels as stills from the videos the kid is recording. As his mother’s condition worsens, we understand that our protagonist hasn’t grasped the enormity of what’s happening to the woman, and when the day comes that he has to walk into that hospital and record his mother’s last moments, he runs away.

As someone who has a terrible time processing his emotions unless he’s recording himself (in a similar way as many writers can’t understand what they’re feeling unless they write it out), and as an aspiring filmmaker, he edits the footage into a movie. He intends to present it at school and get more people to know his late mother.

However, that movie lacked an ending, and the protagonist’s absurd way of concluding it (won’t specify because it’s a spoiler) causes him to get mocked by his classmates. His teachers consider the movie a disgrace to the memory of his mother, and a schoolmate whose mother also died tells him that how he treated her demise was unforgivable.

Despairing, unable to process both his mother’s death as well as having his heartfelt movie mocked savagely, he heads to the roof of the hospital where his mother died, intending to record his suicide. There he meets a female schoolmate named Eri.

She praises his film despite its many faults, and prevents his suicide by dragging him to an abandoned building to watch a series of movies. She intends for him to grow as a filmmaker, so he can ultimately make the movie that represents his true self.

Mr. Fujimoto, master of levitation, just how many twists did you cram in this one-shot? Most of what we witness through the manga is depicted as stills from recorded footage, so we are never sure of our footing. Are we experiencing a recreation of events as the protagonist would have wanted them to happen? Are we watching the elaborate fantasy that he created to cope with the losses in his life? Did any of it happen? Does it matter?

A masterful tale by one of my favorite manga artists, whose taste for the absurd is right up my alley. Sayonara Eri is an ode to the power of art to remake our lives, to allow us to endure the cosmic absurdity for another day.

Teetering between three-and-a-half and four stars. Great title, by the way.

The author of this manga series is a veteran anime scriptwriter who has worked on, if not put together from the beginning, movies and series like A Whisker Away, Anohana, Toradora!, and Hanasaku Iroha, which are the ones I recognize now from her long list of credits. You can tell that level of professionalism in how she wrote this series: it balances the character arcs of five high school girls, each the protagonist of their own tale, who make up their local literature club. I envy authors who can orchestrate multiple viewpoints in the same story, each with its own character arc.

The series starts with one of the girls reciting a risqué passage of one of the novels they choose among themselves to read: A vision of her pale flesh, and then the soft tangle of her undergrowth, filled my eyes as I got down onto my knees and buried my face into the lush, fragrant bower; moused trembling lips over the contours of her flower to slake my thirst on the sweet, aromatic nectar spilling from the crevice. The way each of the five girls reacts introduces their character arcs.

We have a physically undeveloped girl who, as an aspiring writer, is attempting to publish erotica, but she’s getting rejected because she lacks real experience, and she can’t wait to get fucked and get it over with. A cool, mysterious model-like beauty who appears mature, but who as a child had been (as we find out fairly early on) princess-zoned by a pedophile, which screwed her up. A “childhood friend” type who has lived her entire life next to the guy she likes, but who sees her as a sister, so she isn’t getting anywhere with him. A cheerful and kind girl who has never felt the tingles for anybody, and who isn’t sure if she even likes boys. Finally, a total prude for whom any notion of sex makes her feel as if she’s sinking in toxic sludge.

As the author exposes in the notes at the end of the series, she relied on anime artists to design the girls, and you can tell: those kinds of artists focus on differentiating the visual design of the characters as well as their personalities, something that even novelists should take into account. They end up feeling quite memorable in that respect, as if they could carry a much longer series.

Anyway, the inciting incident of the girls’ development happens when, during one of the many doki doki developments in their (non-suicidal, non-murderous) literature club, they discuss among themselves what they’d like to do before they died. The cool, mysterious beauty of the club says simply that she wants to get fucked (in softer terms). From that day onward, the five girls attempt in their fumbling way to navigate their developing sexuality, usually in manners that involve extreme awkwardness and running away; I don’t think I have ever read any other series in which running away was the solution to so many problems.

As the main dude in this story we have the childhood friend and neighbor of the girl who wants to date him. For whatever reason he’s seen as a suitable mate, although the guy is a clueless dork who is obsessed with trains. As I was wondering what angle the author was playing with him, she soiled the guy further by having that girl catch the kid at home as he was masturbating to rape porn (onboard a train, of course). This is the link to that moment in the anime adaptation.

The girls don’t understand their feelings nor their impulses, and make dubious decisions like trying to score with their teachers, with their former abusers, with each other’s love interests, or with each other. Quite realistic and entertaining in that respect.

Although I have read plenty of manga over the years, even these last few, that involved high schools somehow, this was the first series during which I thought, “Oh shit, is this too girly for me?” I don’t read straight shoujo (nor straight shonen for that matter; I couldn’t get into My Hero Academia). I recall an anime whose concept intrigued me years ago, because it involved a magician who traveled to the past and had to hang out there for reasons. I was going along with its girly parts until they started using pocky sticks as magic wands, at which point I was forced to beat my chest and look up videos of people pummeling each other, to regain my masculinity. But yes, during this series I’m reviewing, I wished it fell much more into the seinen category. Curiously enough, that’s what the author intended, as she says in the notes, but when she started writing the script, the girls kept rebelling, due to their initial innocence, to the sexual activities the author intended to force them through. Still, the story is likely quite risqué for Japan.

I enjoyed the story. I empathized with the girls’ struggles to shed their innocence and become hardened degenerates. However, some emotional moments didn’t land that well for me; I felt that he author was trying to tie everything too neatly. But perhaps I simply didn’t understand the emotional depths she was plumbing. I’m quite emotionally retarded, after all.

Anyway, you’ll enjoy this series if you are interested in the budding sexuality of high school girls.

Four stars. I don’t know what the title translates to, but it could have translated to Fuck Around and Find Out.

Our protagonist is a middle schooler who moved out with her family to the boonies for reasons. Her new town has so few children that once her class graduates, her middle school will close down. It also happens that most of her classmates are unredeemable psychopaths who bully our protagonist with the usual middle schooler hijinks: they carve insults on her desk, steal her shoes, trap her in a garbage dump, kick her father on the back with drawing pins attached to the sole, shoot her with a crossbow, stab her repeatedly.

Her parents realize that her classmates are demons, so they allow her to stay at home. However, the horrid shitheads want their torture doll back, and they do something irreversible. I don’t want to spoil it; the manga itself screwed up by showing it at the end of the first chapter despite the fact that it happens a few chapters later.

Anyway, the protagonist is left with little to live for except murderous revenge. I’m talking splatterpunk, intrusive-thoughts-realized violence. I got bullied in school as well, so I derived quite a bit of pleasure from the protagonist’s balls-to-the-wall path of action.

I wanted to post quite a few other panels, but they were too gory. You’ll enjoy this manga if you like the sight of middle schoolers getting brutally murdered. They fucking deserved it, though.

Someone made a live-action adaptation of this lovely story. Here’s the only trailer that doesn’t spoil the whole thing:

The title of this manga series translates to The World of Moral Reversal. It follows the adventures of an attractive high school girl who gets isekai-d into an alternate Earth. This new reality is nearly identical except for the fact that women are now as horny as guys were in her original world, while the local guys are as prude as pure maidens. The entire society is built around capturing women’s arousal, because they will waste lots of money to satisfy it: advertisement is full of nearly naked dudes with huge packages, most of the porn is aimed at women and focuses on men’s bodies, and even regular TV shows pull off daring camera angles to showcase the physical talents of their male casts.

Our protagonist hangs out with the same two girls she knew from her former world, but in this one they have been transformed into a pair of horny monkeys trapped in a spiral of lewd thoughts, who can’t wait to cast off their virginity to any male willing to give them the time of the day. That’s unlikely to happen any time soon, the same way that female classmates in the protagonist’s former world would be reluctant to engage a pair of virgin males who loudly proclaimed the virtues of some hentai book in the classroom.

The story is a slice-of-life that often feels as if the author made a list of all the lewd behaviors that tend to be characteristic of men in the real world, only to then assign them to women and do some entertaining, frequently funny commentary.

Instead of maid cafes, girls go to samurai cafes where attractive boys treat them like princesses for tips. Girls take off their tops while playing tennis in the school gymnasium to attract the attention of the boys. The manga club in school is made out of awkward female loners who draw hardcore hentai. Groups of girls gathered around desks argue about the most interesting objects with which to penetrate themselves. Girls hate exposing their nudity to each other, not wanting other girls to notice any size differences or skin conditions. Female perverts fly drones over men’s public baths to record the action. Sports events have to deal with female streakers. Girls refuse to talk about female underwear, let alone go on trips together to buy some.

The author justifies the logic of this brave new world by saying that because girls can come far more often than men, and are mainly responsibly for bringing about the next generation, it makes sense for them to be far hornier than men. It’s a matter of survival of the species.

My favorite sequence involved an awkward loner guy from the protagonist’s former world also getting isekai-d to this alternate Earth of horny girls. He immediately prostitutes himself to the protagonist’s friends, whose previously aimless lives from then on start revolving around earning enough money to get back to fucking.

All in all, this series is lots of fun. If you’re about as much of a pervert as I am, you’ll probably love it. Apparently it was made by the same author of Interspecies Reviewers, a manga about guys who fuck monster prostitutes and then review the experience according to the particularities of those fantasy races, or whatever. I haven’t read it yet. But I know that the anime adaptation got taken off the air in the US because it was too lewd. That’s a badge of honor.

Five stars.

I’m always on the lookout for new manga to read, but I had only come across this award-winning series twice, the latest one when ChatGPT mentioned it. I wish I had read it sooner, because this long series (about 240 chapters) has become one of my favorites.

The story follows an assassin who works for a nameless organization called Fable by the criminal underworld of Japan. This assassin, considered the best of the best, is, as stated by his colleague slash little sister, a savant, a genius at killing, but a kid at everything else. He grew up fending for himself in the woods for days if not weeks at a time, eating all kinds of nasty shit, and stabbing bears in the eye. Apart from the psychological effects that such an upbringing would have on people (which is explored in the story), the guy is also socially blind and has little concern, as well as understanding, for social norms. Pretty sure he’s supposed to be autistic, because the other hardened assassins consider him a weirdo.

After an introductory hit on a bunch of goons, the guy’s boss tells both of his disciples that they have to lay low for a while: they’re ordered to leave town and spend a year living under the wing of the local Yakuza family. They are prohibited from killing anybody in the meantime, under the threat of getting whacked themselves.

The second disciple is a young woman who lost her parents at an early age and then was trained as an agent by this shady organization. She keeps herself drunk most of the time, partly to stave off boredom, mainly to drown the traumas that, along with her training, have rendered her unable to have normal relationships with people. The author could have played her entirely for laughs, or as a fool, but she’s tough and dependable, often the single person in charge of making sure that the dangerous people around her don’t jump at each other’s throats.

When the couple of assassins start living at the Yakuza safehouse, we see what passes for normal behavior for our mentally peculiar protagonist: he sleeps in the bathtub, he walks around (and greets guests) buck naked, he eats fish whole, and is endlessly amused by a third-rate comedian named Jackal. Because the protagonist comes across as an unimpressive dweeb, the hardened Yakuza people he gets to meet want to test his mettle, or resent that he’s occupying the safehouse rent-free for a year. Various dangerous individuals end up trying to ruin his existence for one reason or another, and he’s forced to deal with them without relying on the main ability that made him a legend.

He also pushes himself to hold down a normal job for near minimum wage, as a delivery driver and illustrator, which puts him in regular contact with normal people, exposing them to the dangers that follow him around.

The author blended together drama, comedy, action, and slice-of-life, with endearing, intelligently-written characters that hang out like buddies one moment only to then shoot each other in the face. For example, the grounded grittiness of a nerve-wracked underworld goon who has to avoid getting killed because he has outlived his usefulness, contrasted with a bored drunkard getting a young player so shit-faced that he injures and shits himself in public.

I can’t properly explain the vibe of this series, the then-and-there-ness of its narrative, but you can tell that this was a labor of love for the author, and that he lived vicariously through it. Even secondary goons that would have been cardboard cutouts in other stories get character arcs or at least the sense that they are the protagonist of their own story.

I only have two complaints, the first one quite significant: the first few chapters of the story felt off. I didn’t quite understand the vibe that the author was setting up, perhaps because at that point I assumed that the protagonist wasn’t intended to come off as an autistic weirdo. That led me to abandon the series the first time I came across it. My second complaint is that some of the fights were supposed to happen so fast (particularly those between members of the same organization of assassins) that they were depicted as blurs, which made them conspicuous in a medium that has depicted most of the memorable fight scenes in fiction.

This series was turned into a live-action film that is probably shit because the Japanese can rarely adapt their mangas into live-action movies properly (I suspect that it has to do with how the staff members and actors get chosen, because they have no issues creating amazing anime). Anyway, here’s the trailer:

If you enjoy manga and love character-driven stories, please read this series. It’s amazing.

Four and a half stars. The title translates to Our Happy Hours.

The main protagonist of this tale used to be a promising teenage pianist. Now, as a thirty-year-old woman, she has swallowed a bottleful of pills and is waiting to die. She wakes up in the hospital, where she receives the unsympathetic visit of her cold, strict-looking mother. The protagonist shares with the old woman that she’s been trying to die since she was a teenager because she fears that at any point she’s going to murder her mother.

The protagonist’s fate seems out of her hands at this point. Her mother wants to send her to a mental institution at least for a month, but the protagonist’s aunt, a nun, offers her an alternative: the two of them will meet with a death row inmate who hasn’t responded positively to the nun’s attempts at supporting him. The protagonist can’t spare any empathy for anybody, even herself, but such a visit seems like a better option than getting locked up in the loony bin.

On the day of the visit, we learn that the death row inmate, jailed for murdering three people, is an orphan who lived in the streets for most of his life. He also clarifies to the protagonist’s aunt that the clergy sicken him: they look down upon people and offer empty platitudes. In his words, “The group which discriminates the most are the people who decorate themselves in pretty words.”

As the guards take the inmate away, the protagonist follows them to give him a drawing that some child had drawn for him. When the guy suggests that the protagonist apparently hadn’t gotten enough of looking down upon him, she surprises him by saying that she considers him lucky. She adds, “If people understood those things at the start of their lives, they’d be able to decide on their own how they’d like to live. When people are betrayed at the end of their lives, they hold on to hope until then. I think that would be a blessing. The greatest burden is when a person is let down in the middle of their life.”

As the inmate gets taken away, confused by her words, he realizes that he has seen this woman before: back when she was, for him, the distant image of a girl playing the piano.

What follows in this short series is a tight plot where the main characters spend a bit of time every Thursday getting to know each other, learning why they ended up as broken people who lost all hope along the way. Is it possible for those who have already given up to welcome the light of a new day?

A bleak yet beautiful tale that I’m very glad I read. I have to thank ChatGPT for this recommendation; I asked it what mangas similar to Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun it could come up with. I had already read most of ChatGPT’s suggestions, and I had come across this particular series I’m reviewing, but I had ignored it because I didn’t see myself sparing any empathy for a death row inmate who likely killed innocent people. I thought the story did a good job acknowledging that the guy’s actions were partly unforgivable, certainly from a legal perspective.

Anyway, I recommend this story if you want to end up with tears in your eyes as you read it seated on a bench in the wooded area near your apartment.