I feel like Oyasumi Punpun stole a piece of my soul that I will never get back. I have never felt this conflicted about any piece of work in any medium. I recognize this manga as a masterpiece at portraying just how despicable and flawed humans can be, but that is where my conflict lies. Reading it made me extremely uncomfortable, not just because the characters in the story were doing horrible things, but because I found myself still able to empathize with those characters even after that, and that unnerved me.
This manga caused me to lie awake in bed the night I finished it, thinking about my life so far and all of the things I once wanted to do but failed to achieve, and how after all is said and done, the only thing that caused my failures was my own weakness and self-doubt, and the only person who can fix that is me. I cried myself to sleep that night.
To me, this is a story about being human, making mistakes, and dealing with the consequences. Some people make more mistakes than others, and some people deal with the consequences in ways that only hurt themselves and the people around them further. In the end, everyone has the capacity to be both ugly and beautiful.
And that is exactly what Oyasumi Punpun is to me. It is so ugly, and yet so beautiful.
