Oct 11, 2023
tl;dr: An okay coming of age story that turns into a terribly written social commentary.
This manga is somewhat of a coming of age story of an especially difficult boy named Kiichi. At just three years old, he’s a boy that doesn’t really seem to listen to or get along with anyone, constantly getting into fights or running off to who knows where. This is troublesome for his parents who look after him, but despite the issues that come up, they do their best in raising him. This portion of the manga is more from the perspective of his parents than Kiichi himself and thus feels
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more like a child raising story than a coming of age story. It’s a lot grittier than any other manga I’ve seen in that genre, but it manages to come out well enough so it’s easy enough to empathize with his parents and get invested in how he’ll grow up.
It gets a lot darker really quickly however. Due to various circumstances, while still only three, he begins living in the slums. There he encounters situations where those who claim to want to take care of him turning out to all be terrible people, while those that simply want to be left alone turning out to be comparatively good. This results in his already extreme personality growing in an even more abnormal manner into someone with a very distinct view on the world, in that he rejects everyone else and also wishes to be as alone as possible. This part is very bizarrely written and thus his character growth doesn’t come across very well. Thus, it’s kind of annoying to read through, but in the end it’s pretty clear what it was trying to do.
The previous portions compose the first half or so of the manga, after which it time skips to when Kiichi is a middle school student. He’s still just as much of a loner as he was as a child and continues to cause just as much trouble, resulting in him constantly having to change schools. Ultimately this leads him to a school where he ends up getting involved in a massive conspiracy which takes up the rest of the manga. The start of this arc was fine, in that it was focusing on establishing Kiichi’s personality and how he differed from all those around him. However, as things progressed it shifted from being less a coming of age story and more so a story that just uses Kiichi as a vehicle for social commentary. But it's all incredibly generic. The conspiracy that Kiichi gets involved with is incredibly generic. How he resolves it is also incredibly generic. And the social commentary given is also incredibly generic. It pretty much amounts to, society is corrupt so get angry and do something.
Being generic doesn’t inherently make things bad, but in the absence of a creative premise, the quality of execution needs to be exceptionally high. Unfortunately, this missed the mark entirely. It’s terrible paced and jumps around haphazardly which results in no sense of mystery or suspense. On top of characters behaving in general in an incredibly unrealistic manner, the cast in general is incredibly inconsistent. Kiichi doesn’t really have a character arc at this point, rather he just does whatever is needed to push the narrative where the author wants it to go. The writing in general is pretty terrible, lacking the ability to get anything across subtly and thus having to use hamfisted approaches like long winded speeches or expositions in order to get its points across. By the end of the manga, it’s difficult to really care about anything happening or anyone it’s happening to.
The art is also some of the worst art I’ve ever seen in a published manga. The art quality in general is really bad and feels really low effort most of the time. The style is also horrendous and makes pretty much everything ugly. This obviously isn’t a manga that should look beautiful or anything, but it’s possible to be gritty without being painful to look at.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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