"Suiiki" follows "Chinami" who lives in a city who are currently facing water shortage. Chinami's a member of a swimming club who one day faints out of heat exhaustion and wakes up in a mysterious abandoned town where it never seems to stop raining. But there's something nostalgic about that town she couldn't quite remember.
Coming from the same creator of Mushishi, Yuki Urushibara's artwork is as beautiful as one would expect it to be. A lot of care & focus was given to the environment & backgrounds. Whether it be a chill rain or the rural elements like trees & waterfalls, the art perfectly sets the mood and atmosphere.
Within its 12 chapter runtime, the story tells the tale of a village via 3 female leads of the same family, "Chinami" our first introduction to the family and plays very prominent role in the plot; "Kazumi", Chinami's mom and "Kiyoko", Kazumi's mom. There are other family members and side characters too, but their relevance is more plot focussed. While Chinami plays a very important role in the plot, it was very vaguely explained through the story's logic but isn't too illogical to break from the immersion of the story.
While reading chapter 1, I had this feeling that this is going to be Yuki Urushibara's vision on global warming & water shortage effects and while it is vastly different from that, it ended up being something more touching on a personal level. A few weeks ago, my friends and I went to our old school, which is now just a bunch of rubble & rocks waiting for someone to reconstruct a movie theater. As we cursed our school management for taking away our place of memories, we unintentionally took a nostalgia trip, having fun thinking about all the goofy & silly things we did while also feeling bitter thinking how all of this place is going to be changed in the upcoming years. As I took one last look before leaving that sad sight, I said to myself; "Well that's just life, I guess?".
Things will change, for better or for worse;
That's just life.
