Volume 1 Introduction: What's important may be found when you become a raccoon dog. Koganemaru, a raccoon dog, goes to town today to scout for more people to live in the mountains. He asks, "Won't you become a raccoon dog?" An office worker tired of her job, a host with a difficult personality, a bully with a troubled relationship with his parents, and many other people with various problems discover what is really important in life by becoming raccoon dogs. This is the start of a heartwarming t...
Cute, but that's all
This manga is an episodic series of vignettes centring on several tanuki interfering with the lives of humans, of which most are about the tanuki Koganemaru trying to convince suicidal and troubled humans to live as carefree animals instead. There are a handful of chapters that connect to each other and offer some continuity, but for the most part the stories just felt like random anecdotes about tanuki shenanigans with no real point or resolution. The tanuki are adorable, and there are some wholesome and hopeful moments, but I can't recommend this one in terms of story or depth of the characters, and I probably won't continue reading the other volumes.
There is no furigana, and quite a bit of hand-written dialogue. The tanuki have sort of rough speech with some Kansai-ben thrown in, but I found it pretty light. As the stories are mostly about the troubles of ordinary people, the subject matter isn't complicated and there's some useful everyday language throughout.