藏 1

This is a short, spoiler-free review of the three volumes.

The manga appears to be an adaptation of a novel. It's a Taisho-era story about the only child of a wealthy sake brewer, Retsu, starting to go blind very young, and her family's attempt to grapple with this fact. I liked the portrayal of the family and their bonds, and the setting is also interesting because it's such a crossroads of modern life and tradition. The extended family argues about whether Retsu should be in western clothing or kimono; her family seeks out both the best medical care and Buddhism to cure her blindness. Unfortunately, the story in the manga doesn't fully adapt the novel or have a real conclusion, as though it were cut off early. It makes me want to seek out the original novel to see how the rest of the story goes and how well Retsu's blindness is handled.

I found it quite hard to read. This is in part because there is some difficult vocabulary (and some specialized sake-brewing, Buddhist, and medical terms), but more because all of the dialogue is written in Niigata dialect, and without being familiar with it, I sometimes struggled to figure it out. The volumes are at least quite short (the first two are under a hundred pages, and the last only reaches 76), and you can read them for free.