What makes a slice of life manga good? Atmosphere is the common answer, but what is that made of? The easy answer is that everything besides plot, which there should be little of in a slice of life, makes up the atmosphere. Background art, character designs, setting, joke gimmicks, and the characters themselves all pitch in, but it's the characters most of all. Heck, it's characters most of all for almost every story. And this is where Yugami-kun ni wa Tomodachi ga Inai (Yugami has no Friends) excels. The characters are endearing from the beginning. No writing that bends over backwards in left-field backstory to tug at your heartstrings here, just some earnestly human characters who play off each other well in comedy and some light drama that usually has a comedic punchline. If you go into this manga thinking "Ah, so Yugami is the Tanaka-kun/Saiki/Sakamoto/Komi of this manga?" you'll be surprised. Yes, predictably the poster boy character is different from most people, and the humour, like for most manga and anime, comes from the gap between normative expectations and this eccentricism (i.e. Yugami not needing friends and his benign antisocialism). "Different" is important here, as Yugami is not a static joke dispenser. The punchlines do continue to come from this "gap" throughout the story, but the characters, Yugami included, are dynamic. Not dramatically dynamic, but they grow up a little just as you would expect, say, your real classmates to. Out of all the characters though, Yugami is still the hub, and the rest are the spokes that rotate around him... Or so it seems if you only read the title and summary. And that's how this manga stands out in a sea of quirky main-character comedy slice of life manga. Yugami isn't *really* the main character.
The initially friendless transfer student Watanuki Chihiro is the perspective character and arguable main character. Chihiro, somewhat socially anxious but mostly neurotypical, is Yugami's foil. She needs friends, Yugami does not. These two, who aren't friends btw, keep getting involved with each other and butt heads, misunderstand each other, misunderstand an understanding between each other, have a brief understanding between each other, then not, the cycle repeats. Hilarity ensues. I think most readers of this manga will at first empathize with Chihiro and share in her disbelief and other amusing reactions to Yugami's "shenanigans", which are just his daily routine to him. This is intentional. Chihiro is the average reader surrogate. Being an "eccentric" person myself, however, I identified with Yugami from the beginning, but I must be somewhat well-adjusted because I also identified with Chihiro from the beginning. Landing in this sweet spot between neurotypical and neurodivergent, I consider myself very lucky. It let me enjoy this manga as much as I did, after all. But I know that I would have enjoyed it even if I was entirely a Chihiro or entirely a Yugami. This is because the writing doesn't treat the unique traits of Yugami, Chihiro, or the other characters as problems that need solutions. While there are some character flaw wrinkles that get ironed out here and there (or sometimes not at all for comedic effect), their core personalities all stay the same. And hey, come to think of it, the core personalities of real people also rarely change. But as we can grow up a little, so do Yugami and Chihiro.
Yugami-kun ni wa Tomodachi ga Inai is a comfy comedy slice of life manga that is refreshingly not designed to go on forever and does not recycle the same joke at the expense of one character's eccentricism. Yugami, Chihiro, and the rest of the diverse cast of neurotypicals and neurodivergents are rarely the unilateral butt of the joke or punchline. They act in whatever ways make them happy even if it comes off as amusing from the other characters' or reader's perspectives. Ultimately, the real humour comes from the misunderstandings that arise between people just different enough from each other to trick themselves into thinking they can't understand one another. But as the manga goes on, Chihiro and the rest do start to understand Yugami in their own little ways and vice versa. In a word, it’s wholesome. My hope is that most readers finish this manga with a better impression of Yugami than they started with. You probably won’t agree with him on most things, of course, but Sakura Jun (the mangaka) has written a work that teaches us to at least tolerate eccentrics like Yugami. For the joy they bring themselves and those who are willing to understand them, the Yugami’s of the world should be allowed to exist as they are, not needing friends while still knowing some people, the Chihiro’s of the world, who are their friends in every way except in name.
Maybe they’re something more than friends?
