To me, the takeaway from this manga is appreciating novel experiences. Our childhoods felt like they dragged on for so long because they were packed full of them, and your brain was taking in so much new information. Guyabano Holiday, to my mind, recommends living in emulation of that stage of your life, minus the incontinence and crying thankfully. Mixed in with this is also cultivating an anticipation for what you may not have experienced yet (see the short story where panpanya walks through a memory of their local area), and also a mindfulness of the world around you even down to the most minute detail (see potentialPizza's review). All of the stories in this manga revolve around these themes, and if you enjoy such a premise then I would definitely recommend you give it a shot!
The primary weakness of all manga and comics, in my opinion, is the period of time that are left in between panels. The audience is required to the fill in the gaps using the information that has been provided on the page to construct an internal chronology of the scene in question (how long the events are taking, where things are in relation to each other, etc), which detracts from the 'immersion'. However, I don't think any of panpanya's manga suffer from this common pitfall in the slightest. At no point in Guyabano Holiday are you under the illusion that what you're reading has any grounding in reality, even the paramount story in this manga - panpanya's quest to buy guyabanos - is of tentative plausibility. At most they're dream diaries, and we only know that in some cases because panpanya just outright says so. You might think they sound reasonable enough to have actually happened, but you don't know that! The fact that you don't know to what degree the story is fiction or not just adds to its charm. Novel experience is wonderful, whether it's something you actually went out and did, or a story that you read.
For these reasons, I see this manga as very positive and uplifting. If panpanya can go out, into the rather dull cityscape of (iirc) Tokyo, and find enjoyment in just about anything, why can't I? As a consequence, I made it my mission to find a guyabano, called soursop in my country, because up until I read this manga I'd never even heard of it. True to form it was rather difficult, and after reading through old blogs written by gen x mums a decade ago, I was able to find a local south-east Asian fruit market that was purported to have them somewhere. My friend and myself spent about an hour or so wandering around in heatstroke-inducing temperatures. Eventually, as we were navigating through a shop shielded from the sun with a green tarp and squeezing past an old Vietnamese man who was packing boxes full of various fruit and veggies to look through the aisles inside, I saw it through the corner of my eye, a guyabano sitting on the checkout counter! I was joyous and immediately purchased it with my friend's money - cash only and quite expensive. Once I got home I cut it in half, got my spoon out, had a mouthful... and it was mid, I'm sorry to say. Too many seeds and the taste kinda hits too quickly, very overpowering. Still not the worst fruit I've ever had, not by a long shot. I have posted a link to a pic of the guyabano we bought on my profile (I can't post it in this review because of the woke mob)
Without panpanya I never would've tried such a strange fruit. I never would've gone to this weird part of my city that I had never been to before, not have had a nice day out with a friend, and not have seen the strangest looking Vietnamese catholic church I'd ever seen in my life. It takes a certain kind of manga to inspire me to actually leave the house in summer, but this one managed! Recommended!
