Sep 14, 2019
34-sai Mushoku-san is a story about a 34-year-old woman who recently became unemployed and her daily routines of cleaning her apartment, making food, watching TV, going to the store, sleeping and overall enjoying her free time as best as she can. This manga is in my opinion slice of life in its rawest and most relatable form and depending on your preferences it can be an absolute hit or an abysmal miss.
Looking at the plot, there really isn't much to say. We follow this unemployed womans life( whose name we don't even know) and we learn about her habits( the things she likes and dislikes)
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and we occasionally get to see what her personality is like through brief interactions she has with the people around her. Almost the entirety of the plot takes place in her rented apartment which I found really fascinating. There are chapters in the manga where we are just treated to images of the apartment when our heroine is not present there. Sometimes it almost feels like the apartment serves as a looking glass from which we the viewers get to see a glimpse of this womans life as she goes by. Although this experimental method of storytelling at first felt fresh and intriguing, in later chapters it made me very frustrated regarding the overarching plot. Throughout the entirety of the story we get to witness our heroines interactions with her family, friends, and neighbors but her relationships with them are left very vague and open to interpretation. Which at one point gave our MC a vale of mystery. But as the story came to its conclusion we the readers were subtly told that she solved her issues but we were never shown what actually happened. Which to me felt a little disappointing and unfair from a readers perspective. The vagueness of all overarching plots in the manga can maybe be attributed to the specific method of storytelling I mentioned earlier. Or maybe it can be attributed to the inability of the mangaka to write compelling drama. But after thinking a little bit more about the manga and rereading some chapters, I came to the conclusion that this entire manga from beginning to end was just a small slice of our heroine's life that she spent living, sleeping cooking and slacking off in her rented apartment. In a way, I believe this story is a meta-slice of life.
My overall rating for the story is a 7
Regarding the characters, we experience almost the entirety of the story through our heroines perspective. Although we know little about her due to the vagueness of her backstory and lack of character interactions. We can't help but feel drawn to her in a relatable sense. Throughout the story, we get to hear her monologues and see what she is like when nobody is around which makes her appear really relatable to the audience. However due to not knowing much about her because of the lack of character interactions, we never quite see the entire picture of what kind of person she is like. There are other characters besides our protagonist but there really isn't much I could say about them without getting into spoiler territory.
My rating for the character/s is 8
There really isn't much to say about the art except that it looks pretty neat for a story with such a simple plot. The quality of the art stays the same from beginning till the end, great attention is paid to the details and character designs although being pretty simplistic suite the story well. I also appreciated the fact that the mangaka regularly changed the clothes the characters were wearing.
My rating for the art is 6
And finishing off with overall enjoyment I must say for me it was a strange ride. At some point, I loved the story and at others, I was really bored reading it. Due to the chapters being repetitive at some parts I wouldn't recommend anyone to try to read this manga in one sitting. The best way to read this manga would be through a prolonged period of time in my opinion at least. Again I must state that this is just a "slice of life" in its purest form devoid of any drama, romance or action. And despite me being not a huge fan of the genre I still found myself compelled to read this manga that for the most part is basically "plotless".
As for my personal enjoyment, I must give 34-sai Mushoku-san a 6.
My overall score for this series is a solid 7.
Thank you all for reading, I hope this review was helpful.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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