August 26, 2023

This is a manga About a Social Issue, and in this case, the Social Issue is Japan's well-known high suicide rate. The main character works as a kind of suicide-prevention social worker at a clinic; one of the manga's aims seems to be raising awareness that these people exist and can be consulted, and I noticed quite a few Japanese reviews mentioned that this was the first they'd heard of them. I am not an expert, but to me, this manga (at least in its first two volumes, which this review is based on) seemed to generally handle the issue well, although I was a bit uncertain about a few things the prevention workers said.

Because this is in part an educational manga, the storytelling does suffer a bit; the first story in particular wraps up so neatly that it really came across as a pilot episode, though the later stories so far have been longer. (The fourth arc still wrapped up a little too neatly, but the second arc is left fairly open-ended in a sad way.) I found the later stories better at communicating the emotions of the clients, as well.

While the story is focused on the clients, we follow as our main character Matoi, who is new to suicide prevention work and has some of the 'passion over the rules' trope, but does struggle with understanding how to best help his clients. I did raise an eyebrow at him doing a home visit by himself when he still seems fairly new (and the client is a teenage girl? I feel like this would not be allowed?) and which seems to have happened primarily to cause more Drama and give room for an educational explanation. Overall, he's fine as the audience surrogate character, if not particularly interesting.

Each client has a different reason for ending up contemplating suicide, and these were pretty clearly picked to drive stories around issues related to suicide. Most arcs include a more senior character explaining these to Matoi These include a man who suffers domestic violence from his wife who ultimately doesn't leave her despite an attempt, at least so far, a client whose insecure attachment style needs to be accounted for, and a client whose story is a pointed stab at Japan's overwork culture and societal ignorance of mental health issues as health issues.

Some other spoilery content notes for the first two volumes (besides the obvious suicide and self-harm themes): bullying, parental abuse, a man cheating on his wife with a teenage girl, underage coerced prostitution, verbal abuse from a manager.

In terms of language: there is almost no furigana except on names, which repeats on their first appearance in every chapter. Generally, the dialogue is fairly everyday and not especially difficult except when referring to psychological concepts. While the premise of the manga does demand a fair amount of talking and internal monologue, it's not super jam-packed with dialogue bubbles, either.

Gradings:23
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