オナニーマスター黒沢 1

Despite the weird, edgy premise, the story quickly turns into a very touching teenage character drama that made me tear up like no manga before. It's essentially a story about crawling out of holes in life and accepting pain to pursue happiness. The main character makes a tremendous development from the self-absorbed know-it-all he starts off as. The first volume barely got me engaged, but it quickly builds up and by volume 3 I was completely pulled into its world.

There's no Furigana and all dialogue is hand-written while the narrative is printed. The narrative can be extremely complex at times with sentences building up through multiple panels and very advanced choices of vocabulary and expressions, as expected from an edgy narrator. I struggled frequently and had to use translation tools constantly. Dialogue is a bit simpler, though often still at a higher level than your typical shounen manga. Additionally, the hand-written Kanji can be difficult to decipher at times. That can be great practice to recognize them better when not being perfectly printed, but also extremely challenging. My OCR tool failed frequently and I had to give up on some words.

If you enjoy works like Aku no Hana and character drama in general that also goes into darker directions at times, chances are high you will enjoy this. There are some developments I wish would have been tackled better or in more detail, but at the same time it can hit like a truck with its beautiful scene construction.