There is no denying that Umi is sick and twisted. What he does and how he treats Beniko is inexcusable to any ordinary human being. Yet the more sadistic he treats her, the more pleasure she starts to derive from it. This doesn't make her a consenting individual, of course, but there is development between them in the way you would expect of a seriously twisted psychological romance.
While it's easy to pass Beniko off as “weak” and “indecisive,” I would more so say that as a product of her own grief and guilt, for the sake of her own sanity, she accommodates Umi's sadism through necessity by becoming a masochist. The whole point of this being a psychological manga is to look deeper than the face value, which can be difficult when it's easy to feel so disgusted by both of the main characters.
The art does an amazing job of portraying the emotions, and the frames and dialogue are as creepy as Umi himself. There is a psychological feel to the manga that leaves you groping for answers—for better or worse, it never really sates your curiosity completely. Is that perhaps plot holes that the mangaka carelessly left behind, or legitimate parts of the manga that are left up to the viewer's interpretation?
This is a difficult manga to rate only on account of it having nearly illegible scans for the last volume, which made the ambiguities even more ambiguous. That said, it's easy to write this off as a crappy shoujo romance—if that's all it is intended to be. But what it's supposed to be may all depend on what kind of mindset you approach it with. Is it an intriguing psychological romance with a sick, twisted relationship that can only be defined as “love”? Or is it just another series that glorifies abuse?
