Sep 8, 2025
Honestly, axe-kun has more work in the manga industry than truck-kun, with the unfortunate side effect that a lot of great stories are cut short when they only need just a bit more to be outstanding. As it is, this one suffered from the axe about one to two volumes before it should have, with the result is that we have a merely “very good” manga.
Osaka Meguru is a normal teenage boy with a childhood friend who teases him regularly about having a boyfriend while he lives the single life. Exasperated, he decides to cheat, goes to the shrine of a local god of matchmaking,
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and petitions the deity for a girlfriend. The deity, a loli-type who also happens to own like 90 smartphones in order to play gacha games, informs him she can’t grant the wish: he’s one of the rare people who lack a soulmate. When Meguru insists, she grants the wish and installs a simple app to his phone that contains six names. One of those six is his soulmate. What the loli goddess forgets to mention is that she changed the rules. It’s not that he lacks a soulmate, it’s just that she dies before they can ever get together. So now, he can’t exist without his girlfriend. In other words, if his soulmate dies, he dies. Fun goddess, isn’t she?
The story revolves around Meguru attempting to save the lives of these six girls, as much out of self-interest as out of a genuine concern for the girls. As the story continues, his understandable desire to live is slowly balanced out by his genuine wish to help these girls who are suffering out of sight of the people around them. The flaw is that our boy is a bit dense and doesn’t see past the subtext the girls have when the reject him, as genuinely begin to develop feelings for him but their initial rejections cause him to assume they will never be interested. It’s funny, though given the circumstances being life or death (and the trauma of his own past), it’s not unreasonable. It’s a genuinely interesting story that met axe-kun before its time, which resulted in the last volume rushing to the ending. There’s even a page with a huge info dump that could have been built out to a whole volume!
The art is well-done. Creepiness, sexiness, death, fear, frustration, death, are all depicted incredibly well. There are numerous well-drawn panels that dominate the page and the reader’s memory, creating an excellent experience.
Even though it’s rushed, it’s a story with an angle I haven’t seen before. The chapters themselves are quite long, so the story is definitely worth reading, even though the fact that it’s shorter than it should be makes it a bit frustrating.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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