Tanpenshuu

It's a stretch to call this a collection of "stories" - these are vignettes, ranging from 3-pagers to 3-parters, about young people in love.

First let's talk about the good: the art, while likely not everyone's cup of tea, is right up my alley. Clean, sparse panels - sometimes just text on an empty background. Drawn in a sketchy style, figures are gaunt but graceful. Naturalistic movements; poetic melancholy. A thoroughly indie vibe. In a few places the background shading makes the floating text slightly hard to read; squinting is highly recommended.

~70% of each vignette consists of inner monologue - while this delivers in terms of raw emotional intensity, it doesn't do much of anything to push the plot along (...what plot?). All I got was a series of abruptly edited moments thrown in my face like confetti. The characters have names and dialogue (most of them anyway), but no semblance of personality - or rather, the snippets presented are way too short for the reader to get to know them, or for any reasonable character development to occur. These people seem to exist solely in a world of love, for the purpose of love, and as such, I couldn't connect with any of them. I could only connect with the feelings and memories of past loves they evoked in my mind - which is all well and good if that's the intent of the mangaka, but 200+ pages of this shtick is a tad excessive imho. Every few chapters, I found myself craving a real story with a substantial plot.

By far my favorite from this collection is "Yoru no Hitokake", in which a roadkill incident causes the protagonist to re-examine her life. "Itaitashii Love IV" is moving, but missing that little ... something. Overall, the vignettes would have better served as blueprint sketches to be fleshed out into full-length works - or at least, I hope that's what they were used for anyway.

Recommended as an emo teenage diary, lovingly illustrated; a tonic for broken hearts in small doses.