TL;DR: This deeply flawed manga has a strangely alluring mood that grips you, but the lack of a coherent story arc for any of the main characters makes it seem like a meandering stream of consciousness text that eventually feels smothering.
This manga is not for the faint of heart. It's dramatis personae includes an abusive father, a peadophile grooming teacher, a peadophile writer, an emotionally manipulative mother, a bulimic girl with body issues and several teens who seem fascinated with joint suicide. It goes without saying that none of these heavy topics are handled with tact. In fact, for much of the 77 chapters I read, the main driving force of the plot was 'the lover's suicide,' a highly romanticized view on suicide taken from some folktale. It's irresponsible to draw a children's story like this. I genuinely have no clue where in the story we are. It could end in the next 10 chapters, or keep going for another 100. Of course, the fact that I read 77 chapters in a matter of hours will tell you that, despite all these flaws, the manga does have its draws.
I guess the main theme of this manga is the suffocating feeling of being trapped and having nowhere to go in life. Many of the main characters in this manga are trapped in some way, either by their family circumstances, financial situations, poor decisions in the past or obligations to others. The one outlier is this is the idol girl, Nagi Aoe, who the manga describes as being empty inside. This girl is a true mystery. For a while I thought she was basically a figment of Reiji, the MCs, imagination, his mind trying to cope with his immense stress and giving vent to his suicidal tendencies. But no, the girl (and yes, she's just 17) is very much alive. For some reason, she's hollow inside and obeys anyone's orders without thinking about it, because she just does not care what happens to her. This character honestly makes no sense to me. I would genuinely like her more had she had been imaginary.
The other characters are dumpster fires in their own right. They're all trapping each other in this small town for their own reasons. Even the one character who I had high hopes for escaping this trap, Chako, got stuck in it. The characters are hurting in their own life, and when they see someone else who is hurting and who can provide them some momentary feeling of superiority or satisfaction, they plunge in and hurt them to take it. Nobody in this manga are angels. They're like caricatures of the dark feelings many of us might feel sometimes.
This leaves the question: What is the central message of this manga? What is it building towards? Because the manga does an excellent job grasping a certain mood that some young people feel, a certain despair at that crossroads of life when your choices should seem endless, but reality and time forcefully trim away your options. It shows us characters who never managed to grow up, who simply continue existing in some sort of juvenile angst. I can see this and I can admire it, the same way I can admire the mood from a Haruki Murakami novel. Sometimes you just can't look away from someone about to do something catastrophic, and you watch in horrified transfixed fascination at the event unfolding before you. You feel powerless and caught in the sway. For a moment, you want to understand what would drive someone to live like this. That's what I mean by alluring. But while this mood can attract readers, it has to eventually build up to something. There has to be more substance. Many of Murakami's MCs are likewise apathetic to their own futures and go through life having sex with weird women. But Murakami has a plot in mind. Even when its open-ended, the story has at least one arc. This manga needs to find its story arc. I feel it has something to do between Nagi Aoe and Reiji. If this is the case, it needs to get there faster. This is the main impediment to my rating this story higher.
