*SPOILER WARNING*


Am I a fool? I never knew what that word really meant. I still don’t. I spew out the word ad nauseum as a generic insult, never thinking too deeply about what I really mean. But what does that mean? Three Days of Happiness seeks the answer to that question. Does it mean to be dumb? Does it mean to be unsuccessful? Is it really just that: a generic insult? Certainly not. A person is not innately a "fool." While the word is too broad to assign an inclusive definition to, I can think of an interpretation: one who creates his own hell. And certainly--Kusunoki is a fool.

Kusunoki is a deadbeat who has effectively lost the game of life. But he is a deadbeat because he is a fool. His childish arrogance became a burden, a burden which defines Kusunoki's foolishness. Or so he thinks. Many readers will see a reflection of themselves in the early Kusunoki, and maybe I kind of did as well. His mindset deprecates from “I’m not happy”, to “I’m not meant to be happy”, to “I don’t want to be happy”. While depression often romanticizes itself in ways similar to Kusunoki's, it is Kusunoki's foolishness that let it deprecate so far. Many readers will find themselves thinking the exact same way. And this--this is what it means to be a fool. When Kusunoki was a child, he thought he was destined to be someone great. His slightly above-average intelligence gave him a snobbish ego, which he believes set his expectations too high, eventually turning him into the loser he is today. One thing leads to another, and he ends up in a shop that buys your lifespan.

I’m sure many of us have thought of it at some point, as it’s not too profound of an idea. But Three Days of Happiness gives great care and has cultivated it such a meaningful way. Three Days of Happiness not hold any punches: it immediately hits Kusunoki in the gut, valuing his life at a meager 300,000 yen. But it is not just Kusunoki, who is given a reality check. I think many readers of the novel will find themselves in similar situations; I know I did. We are all forced to realize what we really are. What the reader really is is up to them to decide, but it is this scene in such an early point of the novel that makes you realize what this story is really about. Thinking about it, I’m not sure if I would want to know the true value of my life. I think of it in the same vein as seeing my future. If that value was low, I would probably just give up then and there. And Kusunoki is the same way initially. However, he reluctantly sells his remaining 30 years for the appended value, leaving him with only 3 months to live. From here, Kusunoki comes to realize the extent of his foolishness and the concept of humility.

This leads to the next point. Are foolishness and happiness somehow intertwined? Can you have one, and still have the other? This is the fundamental metaphor of the story, from my point of view. When one’s foolishness diminishes, their happiness will aggrandize. And Miyagi is the proprietor of Kusunoki’s happiness. Miyagi is a girl assigned to watch over Kusunoki for his remaining 3 months. While initially cold at first, Miyagi comes to grow on Kusunoki, and the two eventually become an emotionally inseparable pair. While Kusunoki is initially dejected, Miyagi, unintentionally, comes to help him realize what he should be doing. He creates a bucket list, and while simple, is what he wants to do. These little things are what lead Kusunoki to happiness. Visiting small towns, gazing at the stars, riding a motorcycle in the countryside, buying drinks from vending machines. These are all seemingly insignificant things that once put together form something of gaiety for the pair. This is beautiful.

I read this book almost a year ago now, and this is what I think about almost every day. Little things. I don’t need to live some exuberant life filled with success and riches. I realized I love simply riding my bike around at twilight, sitting around reading all day, playing video games with my friends, watching anime, walking my dog with my dad, and just things that maybe improve my mood just a little bit. Unfortunately for Kusunoki, it took selling the rest of his life to realize it.

I just want to talk about Miyagi for a second. She is beautiful. Not just attractiveness, she is just a really beautiful person. She really showed Kusunoki what it meant to live, and maybe even me as well. Much of the story is just Miyagi showing Kusunoki more and more things about herself. She shares her dreams, aspirations, failures, and her downfall. Miyagi is bound by the lifespan-selling agency due to a debt her mother incurred while Miyagi was young. Due to the nature of her work, while on the job, she is invisible to other people. Miyagi is invisible, yet Kusunoki does not hesitate to talk to her in public. Their happiness is almost reciprocal because Kusunoki enjoys talking to Miyagi, and Miyagi enjoys when Kusunoki talks to her in public, regardless of the fact that he looks completely crazy. But by the end of the story, they are both truly happy. Neither of them care. And that's what life is really about: there is no meaning, so why would you care?

The story presents somewhat of a paradox - Kusunoki is happy, but would he be happy if it were not for the knowledge of his impending death? And this is the only true escape from foolishness: complacency with death. You will die one day, so why care? "Philosophical" debate over analogous pretentious topics such as "the meaning of life" can end at "there is no meaning." You're gonna die, idiot. This book has really stuck with me. The idea of being okay with death is something I’ll probably never achieve. But it presents something broader than that--the meaning of happiness, and the discard of foolishness through a topic seldom covered in the medium of light novels. The beauty of this story is something that I don't think I can define. But there's one thing for certain: if this story can’t be considered beautiful, then I’m not sure beauty exists.

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“Hey you, were you once considered a talented kid but now you are a sad teenager? Then come read this totally relatable novel!”

If self-diagnosed le depressed sadboi blog was a novel. This has to be one of the most self-pitying pieces of fiction I’ve ever read. Keep in mind that there will be spoilers, as it’s hard to criticize the content without specifying it. If you want to read it without spoilers and my preface didn’t deter you, then go on, it’s short, come back later.

Three Days of Happiness is a drama. You might even think it’s touching if you don’t stop to actually think about the story. Unfortunately there are too many things that don’t exactly add up with the story. This is going to take a while.

Let’s start with the protagonist. Our dude is poor. So poor that he has to sell practically all of his possession to even be able to buy the cheapest food. Our dude is also a young man that goes to a college. No, the setting isn’t some dystopia where the economy is completely fucked. No, it also isn’t set in some third world country (or America). Seems to be regular Japan. Now I’m not an expert of Japanese law, but according to Google, Japanese parents have legal obligation to support their dependent children. The novel tries to bypass this possible solution by having the protagonist say he doesn’t want to ask his parents for help. There are first problems with it. The first one is that this doesn’t mean jackshit as the background of the relationship between the protagonist and his parents are never properly explained beyond some disagreement over the choice of college. So it makes the protagonist out to be a drama queen who would rather keep the “victim” status and wallow in self-pity than to actually solve the situation. The second is – if you don’t care about your parents, you might as well use the government to get what you’re legally owed. Certainly seems like a better future than dying of malnutrition after giving up your ever joy in life, but hey, that’s just me. Again, the stubbornness might have been believable element if the parent relationship had been properly explored.

If you didn’t get it yet, our protagonist is “terribly depressed”. This seems to be because he wanted to achieve great fame when he was a child, but that didn’t really work out and now he’s just an average Joe. The horror. Oh, and also always had trouble socializing or whatever. The average adolescent problems, but as mentioned previously, the protagonist has a terrible habit of self-pitying. The novel feels like it was made to be relatable to young unhappy people, but given the mixed messages and the moral it gives (more on that later), if you actually identify with the protagonist, consider seeking professional help. This isn’t on the level of relatively harmless self-insert of the likes of “lone wolfs” like Oreki, Hachiman or Ayanokouji. The mc here has issues and it’s not really the other’s fault.

The setting - a mysterious establishment where you can trade in your lifespan, time or health for cash. Such interesting ethical questions could be mused over, it his had been featured in a better written series. Here it’s just a device so the protagonist can kill himself but in a way we could find touching. The rule here is that you can make three transactions in your life. Rule that could have been pretty important, if the story actually used it. Or in other words, if the protagonist wasn’t dumb. So you need money, right? Perhaps you could sell some of your lifespan for money? But what’s that, your life is worth less then you thought? So what do you do?
a) try out one of the other two options
b) realize it’s a scam and try to find different non-magical way to get money, perhaps get a bit adventurous considering you’ve considered giving up your life for money
c) perhaps sell just a bit of the lifespan to feel it out, and if you’re okay with it come back to do your second transaction
d) Just say “fuck it” and exchange basically your whole life for some pocket money, because as you need money to live, it only makes sense to throw your whole life away to get money, so you can fuel your now non-existent life.
Of course, d) it is. And sure, you could say that the novel was trying to make a point of how ridiculous this decision is, but it did not give me the feel of being self-aware on such level, so I don’t think so. It certainly doesn’t do such thing on purpose. Sure, chalk up the poor life decisions to the depression, but that’ just a cop out. Maybe if depression was explored further than “Woe is me, my life is worthless, no need to live it out”, I’d accept that reasoning.

Well, at least not the protagonist has the money. Surely they will actually be put to some use, right? Nope, the protagonist continues to act poor even though he has literally just 30 days of life left. At some point he starts to literally throw the money out. Why did you even make the exchange in the first place my dude? What was the point? Or is this another “hurr durr there was no point because le depression”? It’s so tiring. It really makes me think the lifespan exchange is there just so the protagonist can kill themselves without the novel having to mention suicide. Cowardice.

Enter the designated love interest. Yep, I have beef with her too. In the first place, it would be nice if for a change there was a story with a male and female main characters that don’t fall in love just because they are around each other. Does everything that contains people of opposite sexes really have to turn into a romance? Couldn’t they just be friends? Couldn’t they just be nice to each other because they find their poor circumstances in common and feel bad for each other? Apparently not, because we need some hastily put together romance. They literally fall in love just by being in proximity. There is no character dynamic. As a wise poet once said – “He was a boy. She was a girl. Can I make it any more obvious?“. The romance feels completely unnatural and forced. And come on, a pretend date? That’s an awful, awful cliché. One when used just makes it obvious that the author has no idea how to naturally put the characters together. Oh, her circumstances you want to hear? Just another victim, of course. Shouldering a debt of their parent. Yes, this bullshit plot element again. Just default on the debt. Don’t accept the responsibility. It’s not yours. Fuck the company, don’t know don’t care. “But you probably can’t say no to them, surely they have ways to make you comply” – again, I might have accepted this excuse if the novel actually entertained the thought. If the novel showed any attempt to say no and for it to not work. But it goes like “Oi ur mom died, now you go throw your life away” “Ok.”.

I do have something positive to say about this novel – I didn’t expect the midway plottwist. In fact, I was going to write in this review that the novel is so predictable that I’ve guessed that it would end up with the protagonist somehow making his life more valuable, selling the rest of his life and freeing the girl from the debt. So it was nice to find out that his life was actually worthless from the start, the initial assessment was fake and so that will in no way happen. Sure, it makes no sense for the girl to give out her own money just so some random dude she literally just bet in her business hours doesn’t get even more sense, but at least it’s not predictable. Stupid, yes, but not predictable.

Another thing that is done better than expected is the excuse of how people don’t notice the invisible girl. Usually the story just makes the people invisible and calls it a day, as if there weren’t any ways to prove the existence of physically present object/person that just happen to be see-through (yes, I’m looking at you AnoHana). Three Day of Happiness solves this by stating that not only is the girl invisible, any action she does by interacting with the object is not seen by others. No floating cups of soda, people see it as if the soda had not been picked up in the first place. Surely, there are definitely still other ways to prove she is there, but as that is not a major plot point here, I’ll give it a pass. For a change.

Now, the great finale. Greatly stupid. Every aspect of the novel that doesn’t make sense culminates in one big nonsense. The forced romance makes the protagonist want to save the girl. The girl says no. The protagonist attempts to do so anyway. How? Well, since he’s now in love, he now has back his talent of art (you know, as mentioned at the start, previously a talented kid). Apparently he’s a great artist, so now his life is worth more. Even though he didn’t pick up a pencil for years (literally) and he just did some sketching. With the power of art and love, instead of his life whole life being worth 30 yen, less than 30 days are enough to almost free the girl from the debt. How in the fuck? Well, he would be an extremely famous artist, or so the appraisal says. In the remaining days he would become so famous he would be immortalized in art textbooks for years to come. I’d really like to know how exactly the author of the novel thinks such a feat would be possible. With some luck you could maybe go viral (and get forgotten in few more days), but in the modern times where artists with amazing skill are overlooked while banana on a wall makes the worldwide news and while vore furry artists earn enough from commissions to be set on life, irrelevant to the actual artistic value of their work) no art textbooks will care about literal nobody somewhere in Asia and his few artworks. He’d be lucky if they wouldn’t be just thrown out after his death. Talent alone isn’t enough to get famous, definitely not in such short time. Of course, this is just described as a possible future thanks to which the protagonist’s life now has value, it doesn’t in fact happen (but it could), so the author doesn’t have to write how it would happen, so the illusion of this being even possible is able to work (on some readers). With last three days remaining in his life, the protagonist is happy as he did something worthwhile in his life by saving a damsel in distress. But what’s that – the damsel did the same? She sold out her life to be able to spend three days together with the protagonist in her non-invisible form? What the fuck? And she even mentions how she has enough money left over to be considered rich, so she didn’t even have to sell all of her lifespan – but she did so anyway, meaninglessly, just to die quicker I guess. Just call it a suicide dear author, you coward. And wait, that was literally my prediction on what would happen, just with addition that makes it even more stupid. Dammit.

So, what is the moral of the story? If you’re poor your life sucks, but it will continue to suck even if you get money. If you suspect other people secretly hate you, you’re probably right. (I didn’t even cover that part of the story in this review, but it sucks too). If you feel your life is worthless, instead of actually trying to improve it, throw it away - burn it out fast. Great stuff. And what was the ending supposed to be? For all practical purposes, it’s two young adults killing themselves, one because he’s depressed, one because she fell in one with the suicidal one and didn’t want him to kill himself alone? Is that supposed to be romantic? Is that supposed to be touching? It’s stupid. Laughtable, even. Poor attempt at depicting depression, in a way glorifying it. At least it’s just a single volume, so the misery didn’t take that long.

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