The plot, like Aku no Hana, involves an extremely submissive and good-for-nothing main protagonist, this time a hikikomori, Komori Isao, who finds himself magically transferred into the body of a school-girl. The school-girl in question is the Mari of the title. She's been going to the same convenience store to buy the same things at night, and he keeps seeing her and of course he thinks she's his 'angel'. Each time he'll also stalk her back a bit. But this time when he stalks her back he finds himself in her consciousness.
For a body-swapping plot, the main difference is that this time Mari doesn't go into Isao's body, but rather just vanishes. And now there's two Isaos going about, one which is Mari-Isao, and the other which is his original hikikomori self, completely unaware of the existence of his new counterpart. So of course some can theorize that Mari pulled off a sort of Pierre Menard/Don Quixote thing and decided to 'become' a hikikomori just to experience the type of viewpoint she wouldn't normally have had. Like a bi-personality disorder born from societal pressure. But that's just speculation. In any case its a magical realist thing that doesn't matter, since the how is not exactly the crux of the plot.
The other character is Yuki, who is Mari's 'stalker', and is the first to notice that Mari is not Mari anymore. She's the lowest on the social tier, while Mari is the highest, and the whole story is about how Mari-Isao navigates Mari's past relationships and tries to maintain her social ties, whilst trying to find her original self. Whilst Inio Asano works with high verisimilitude, the difference is Shuuzou, and I don't think this is his failure as a writer but rather his style of getting at the themes he wants to convey, is that his characters are more like archetypes in human bodies. So in Aku no Hana we had the principle of Chaos, Nakamura, and the principle of 'Normalcy', Saeki, and the everyman caught between both, and how all three became amorphous in nature and started to mix into one another. Likewise in here we have Loser-girl Yuki, Loser-guy Isao, the different superficial facets of society represented by Mari's bitchy friends, and the spiritually-hermaphroditic Mari-Isao who serves as the primary explorer navigating these different landscapes. So maybe you could call Shuuzou the 'ecchi-Kafka' (in that case I wouldn't mind calling Asano the ecchi-Dostoyevsky)
In a Synecdoche New York, Charlie Kaufman, kind of way, looking at yourself from an outsider perspective, as in the view of someone else, can lead to interesting revelations. Yuki tells Mari-Isao more about Mari than probably Mari herself acknowledges, and then Mari-Isao in turn overturns the life of Yuki and Isao by forcing them to confront their respective psychoses. Psychosexual and angst filled climactic moments are everywhere. Feels kind of more 'mature' than Aku no Hana, and more focused on meditating upon the themes, but as a result less crazy cathartic.
Probably Shuuzou is also getting outside his comfort zone by writing from a more 'female' perspective, since in this work the amount of female characters are a ton more than the male ones, and thus he spends less time romanticizing male-angst. Especially apparent since Mari-Isao also comes to the conclusion that Isao is a completely horrible useless human being (although also admitting that everyone is sort of like that) and Isao goes through a hell lot more pathetic humiliation and breakdowns than Takao, without the Anarchist breakthrough to go with it. If you go from the perspective that Mari-Isao is a girl rather than a guy in a girl's body, then this manga definitely passes the Bechdel test. Although Shuuzou also has that bleak 'socially active people do stupid useless superficial things' sort of view, and the 'girls enact in brutal social terrorism against each other' sort of view.
So all in all we have a somewhat intense psychological manga about societal farce and why bonding over video-games and getting crazy hyped in karaoke sessions, and Love, is the true path of self-actualization.
(Update 20/03/2017)
I completed this manga around 2 years after I started. In the meantime, I developed a greater skill to analyze art due to my own training in drawing as well as coming in contact with stuff like Sakura no Uta. I take back what I said about Shuuzou's drawings being stiff & mostly functional - because he seriously cross-hatches everything to the point where it all feels like some drifting impressionistic fantasy of a school life. Shuuzou has to be one of the single-best artists working in the world of manga today. You can feel the sheer amount of work emanate from every page. I think he changed his style over time though - because I flipped back to an earlier chapter and it seemed more normal.
Honestly, though, after reading a certain few other works - the psychological aspect isn't as cutting. But there is a caveat. It isn't as cutting if you take it only in terms of the plot elements. On the other hand, the way the art syncs with the psychological states is absurdly ridiculous.
This magisterial cross-hatching Shuuzou pulling off his masterful ziggy-zaggies on the latter sections deepens the narrative a whole lot. I was reading the comments in the later chapters where people were going crazy about how 'silly' it was getting - but on the other hand I think I'd probably return to the later sections more and more just because I want to eat every single page of that cross-hatch goodness that he delivers. How the fuck did Shuuzou get so good? Did he get possessed by the ghost of Van Gogh or something? This will probably remain one of life's greatest mysteries. Now if only he'd stop making those goddamn angst plots and start using his skills for something meatier and more powerful.
Anyway - read this for the psychological angst stuff and stay for the cross-hatching & Yuri.
