Akai Mi Hajiketa

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Akai Mi Hajiketa is a collection of 13 beautiful short stories with a common theme, and that theme is love. Because it is an anthology, it's not incredibly easy to generalize my views across all stories, because even though I say that the common theme is love, it doesn't mean it's all about romance.

This is an anthology that celebrates the idea of love in all its form, whether it is the romance between two people who spent eight years together only for it to fall apart, whether it is the love for life itself, whether it is the love between friends and companions who ... follow a similar dream or whether it is just an unrequited crush. Each story, of varying length, focuses on an episode in the lives of various people of different ages. Some of these stories are very short, taking only a handful of pages to tell, while some are longer, going into more details.

Some stories do stand out more than the others. There are those that leave you happy after you're done. And there are those that leave a rather odd after-taste. There are also some that might not affect a person at all. These emotions will depend on the reader, but needless to say, the anthology does manage to create a ripple across an entire plethora of feelings that a reader might experience. Which is what makes this collection of short stories so good.

As an added bonus, there is a 14th omake chapter that gives an epilogue to some of the more prominent stories in the book. There's not much else to say about this anthology without breaking into the details of each and every story.

The art is reminiscent of works by authors such as Yoshida Motoi. It is a charming style with well drawn characters and nice attention to details in the backgrounds as well. The art style brings out the emotions felt by the characters beautifully, and that in itself is not only an incredible feat, it is also necessary since the stories lose their luster without these emotional characters.

I will highly recommend this collection for people who love romance and slice-of-life stories.

tl;dr : An amazing episodic, atmospheric and short manga. It's meant for you to relax and enjoy yourself. I recommend Mushishi if you like this kind of manga.


Story : 9
- This manga has no coherent "plot" or continuous plot line , but instead a series of random short and different stories written on various chapters, in other words, it's an episodic manga. You can still enjoy yourself without worrying about not understanding the plot when you read a random chapter. While some people dislike this kind of format, I personally really like this. Each chapter is a new and exciting story, waiting to be ... told. As there's no plot, the story is very atmospheric and will make you experience a full roller-coaster of emotions every single chapter. I probably rant too much on this but the final does pay off and probably leave you in a bittersweet feel.
Art : 10
- The art is arguably one of the best thing about this series . It's very clean , and very gorgeous. It gives off a weird yet wonderful feeling how the characters appear Japanese while having many features that would make them Western , and the style blends neatly between being old-fashioned and modern. It's a feast to the eyes.
Characters : 10
- The series is short, so the characters do not get that much screentime. However, the author did a fine job of giving them character-developments , along with the giving us the essences of each character. You can clearly understand them, their actions, their emotions , their personalities in a very short time. This is a rare case of you just wanting to cheer and root for every characters (At least in my case, but i'm sure the majority of people will agree with me)
Enjoyment: 10
- It's the kind of series that you enjoy yourself with some relaxing slow jazz music, along with your favorite drink and some snacks. It's episodic, it's atmospheric and it's short , so if you are bored/lonely on a free evening, give yourself a treat and read this.
Overall : 10