Deep Love: Ayu no Monogatari

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I'm shocked. I didn't expect this manga to be so different from any manga I've read. The plot itself is very interesting and different but the ending is very well-thought in my opinion.

Ayu is a teenage girl that has no dreams, who doesn't aim for happiness and is involved in prostitution. The athmosphere is well presented and you can feel so much emotion like the emptiness, despair, misery, new founded hope by many characters. The story also gives a good life lesson, the choices you make have consequences whether you like it or not and not everyone in a bad place is a bad person, ... people do anything to survive, fill the void in their hearts in this cruel world.

The art is pretty, clean and easy to understand. I'm pleasantly surprised by the greatness of character development.

I recommend it if you're not a young person or have a traumatic experience that may get you triggered when reading this manga. Given the plot, it has nudity but not too much that you will feel discomfort. If you're not either of those, give this a shot!

If you are looking for a one-shot-esque torture session, this one should be a fairly good one.

Since it's a kind of "old" manga, the art style might feel subpar for some people - and the story is short, too, everything is squeezed into these few chapters. So if you want to try to enjoy the manga to its best capacity, I'd recommend reading only a single chapter per day.

The problems that the manga focus on are heavy, and the characters are not in good shape, either. At least there is a glint of hope in the middle of the story.

I wish the ... story was more fleshed out, and gave us, readers, some time to become more attached to the characters.

[Spoiler Review!]

After reading all the reviews here, I came to realize something. This manga is a sick attempt at using horrible events and circumstances to create a sense of "meaning" and evoke pity within the minds of readers who take the bait.


Story: 2/10

The "story" here has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. The "story" revolves around our main character, Ayu, and the horrible life she lives. Many questions arise when reading this manga, such as: What happened to her parents, what caused her to start prostituting herself, what did she need the money for, and many more. The only character trait Ayu has ... is that she is a teenage prostitute. That's it.

Ayu eventually meets an old lady who takes pity on her and lets Ayu live with her. The granny tells a sad story about her husband that is meant to evoke further sadness towards the "story." Ayu also finds a dog later, so that's cool.

Ayu also has a friend named Reina, who a group of girls hates for some unknown reason. Reina and Ayu later have sex with some old dude because the old dude just walks up and asks them how much they are paying for sex, which is something that I highly doubt happens while people are just randomly sitting somewhere in broad daylight in a public area.

Oh yeah, Ayu also had a gigolo who basically forces her to do heroin and ra*es her sometimes. He had too much drug money debt and eventually begged Ayu to find a ton of money to help pay this debt. Conveniently, granny has almost all the money Ayu needs to help her gigolo out. Of course, tragedy has to strike again, and her gigolo spent the money on drugs and killed himself. Ayu just walks out and later doesn't show any sign that she cared that this happened.

Reina later gets robbed by the girls who hate her, gangra*ed by the male friends of those girls, and then gets the word "wh*re" carved into her leg. There is no reasoning as to why these girls hate her enough to do this to her. Did she steal someone's boyfriend? Is it because she is overly energetic? Who knows! The manga doesn't like telling important things like this because it is too busy trying to fit as many tragic things into the manga as possible to make the reader feel sad! This whole issue is just forgotten in later chapters!

Reina later tells Ayu what happened, and Ayu wants to avenge her friend! To do this, Ayu threw coffee on the main girl's head (how did she know this was the main girl?) and then stabs her in front of a huge group of people who just don't care that some high school girl was just mutilated in front of their eyes. Ayu later calls granny to pick her up, but granny has foot issues, and she fell while running over to Ayu, so her doggy comes instead.

Granny later tells Ayu that she had an "adopted" child with a heart illness, and Ayu tells the granny that she sells her body for money and that she stole like 1.5 million yen from her. Granny dies the next day for some reason. Maybe she really hated teenage prostitutes that much; who knows.

Fast forward, Ayu meets Yoshiyuki (Granny's "adopted" child). They like each other and start hanging out. His family doesn't let him out of the house often due to him having heart issues, so Ayu decides to take him to Okinawa because he wants to go there. When they come back, the police arrest Ayu and Yoshiyuki has a heart attack or something like that. Ayu is now not able to see Yoshiyuki and begs his dad to make him happy since she can't see him. Of course, to make the story more tragic, the dad says he can ensure that by having Ayu have s*x with him. Ayu then goes back to prostituting, catches HIV, it develops into AIDs, and she dies. The dad also kills himself, so we love a happy ending!


Art: 5/10

Typical shoujo art style. Nothing much to say here. I particularly dislike the cover art for the volumes, as it looks significantly worse than the art in the manga (which is usually the opposite).


Character: 2/10

Honestly, most of these characters are pretty shallow. Ayu's only personality is being a teenage prostitute who has the worst luck in the world, Reina's personality is being Ayu's friend that gets gangra*ed, and Yoshiyuki's personality is being Ayu's love interest with a tragic fate to make the readers feel sadder. Every other character in this manga are just plot devices that could be exchanged with literally anything, maybe excluding the granny.


Enjoyment: 2/10

I chuckled when one of the old dudes called Reina's private part a biscuit.

Overall: 2/10

In conclusion, this is an overrated and sad attempt at a tragic story that uses cheap plot tropes to trick readers into believing this to be a magnum opus of sorts. Thankfully, it was a concise read, but it is time for me to read the sequels and likely see the same exact thing all over again.