Oyasumi Punpun’s excessive fatalism isn’t very believable, doesn’t do the story or the people in the story any favours and it makes them hard to like. Punpun’s the protagonist, the reader will be sitting in his head for the majority of the manga. He’s not a good person, (no such thing in Asano’s world) but he’s understandable in his actions through the story and extorts a good deal of sympathy from the reader. Story follows him through his life as a grade schooler up to his early twenties. Nothing of much substance occurs throughout his life, which has led people to categorize Punpun as a ‘slice-of-life’ manga, a generous act of charity that attempts to excuse the vast, dead spaces of boredom present everywhere in the story. First signs of life only start to emerge around twenty chapters in, when Punpun’s uncle delves into his past with a girl he meets.
Punpun has multiple digressions of this nature that pad out that pad sad bad nad cad dad chad jihad out what would otherwise be a straightforward narrative. They’re a welcome change of pace because the main narrative is so aimless and boring and goes nowhere forever, but these side stories have little connection to the plot, so in the case of the Pegasus cult for instance, where the story being told is more boring than the main narrative (hard, but not impossible), enjoyment grinds to a halt, and you get the feeling that Asano is just messing around and around and around and around and riverrun past eve and adam from michael bay to verve of snore.
When Asano actually tries to convey something of substance because he doesn’t try most of the time let’s be real, it results in memorable that I can’t really remember displays of talent, an example would be the big, imposing, photorealistic pages of Punpun walking through the city here’s what it looks like:
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The pictures look impressive, they support the melancholy atmosphere of the story in an effective manner. Looking at Punpun in these drawings (center right), you can clearly get a sense of his isolation and alienation. Delving deeper into the visuals, Punpun’s unconventional character design allows for further innovative storytelling by being able to morph his shape, something Asano does to heighten the dramatic tension of certain scenes and/or express Punpun’s current emotional state, to good effect
Example:
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For some reason along the way every so often Saint Asano decides to stand at his pulpit and deliver some sermons and I do not like this because he says things that I think are wrong. Whenever Asano does so, whenever he expresses an opinion through one of his characters, he preaches in such an assertive and self-righteous manner that I’m automatically inclined to disagree with him, even if what is being said is, to a certain extent, correct. It’s exasperating to read much like my hunger strike reports sent to the Taliban, because it’s exasperating to see something simple be blown up needlessly into something complicated, and it’s exasperating to listen to a question that is being asked not out of personal concern but out of a sense of obligation, which is what Asano’s societal musings end up feeling like.
Main issue I had with Punpun was boredom. There’s not much of anything in its story or characters to latch onto emotionally. The characters are unlikeable, and the story is largely uneventful. I’m not a fan of the attempts at surrealism, because they aren’t rooted in reality, and I view them as sort of a cop-out. I’m even less of a fan at the attempts at realism, because it presents a distorted view of reality that’s impossible to buy into. Naturally, I know, it’s a story, a manga story at that, so I know there’s always this pressure on the author to make something big and something shocking happen and present the world as a darker place than it actually is – and I actually liked these parts of Punpun, they’re the only parts that left any lasting impression. The two parts I have in mind – the storylines involving Punpun’s uncle and the pottery class, and the concluding section of the manga, starting from Punpun meeting a certain someone’s mother – are gripping to read okay they’re not really gripping but I feel bad criticising him all the time. There is some real audacity in the scenes that transpire during these segments. At the same time though, the showcases of sharp violence are at odds with the thought-provoking atmosphere that Asano seems to want to cultivate.
Don’t know why Asano tries to portray himself as someone who creates manga that are different from the rest of the escapist, juvenile shonen fantasies. If he really believes it, he should just let his work speak for itself, in my opinion. Especially no need for him to go out of his way to de-rail his own plot by using the Pegasus cult to criticise escapism. A needless detour in a story already filled to the brim with needless detours. Take a step back and examine the content in Punpun: most of what’s he’s created is as juvenile and as lowbrow as the manga he criticises and without the redeeming, life-affirming messages that these manga export. There is no way Asano should feel as if he’s in the position to act as judge jury executioner on the entire shonen manga population when half the time his manga doesn’t even meet his own standards, but that’s probably why he feels the need to assert that his manga is better, it comes out of insecurity, because he knows that the gap between him and the rest is not as big as he would like it be.
I understand how Asano can provide solace to his readers (not really) and why this work of his is beloved (again, not really), because by expressing the effects of a life of isolation and unhappiness through the violent and sad actions of his characters, Asano shows the reader that they’re not alone, he feels the same pain they do, though I don’t think this is the right way of going about things as its pretty shallow, as in it doesn’t get at the source of the character’s, of Punpun, and of Asano’s unhappiness, and consequently does not get at the source of the reader’s unhappiness, which makes the whole affair pointless to sit through. If there was more honesty and sensitivity in Asano’s writing here, or if there was more of a solid resolution to the story’s many plot points and struggles, it could’ve justified the long and hard slog to read it all and get to the finish, but there is not. All the way along it is filled with self-loathing and bitterness and resentment with the usual contradictory spurts of narcissism that endear you even less to the story and its characters. Not that its badly made, its just not enjoyable.
