Mikkakan no Koufuku
Three Days of Happiness

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So, they finally added this to the website.

This book is incredibly painful, for all of the right reasons.

It is relatable in a cathartic and fire-starting way. The reader - typically a young man - will inevitably project all of their failings onto Kusunoki. In my case, Three Days of Happiness spurred me to take my own life a little more seriously.

That being said, it is also incredibly beautiful. Brilliantly written, it generates powerful images at every critical point of the novel. The author, Sugaru Miaki, manages to catch you completely off guard on a number of occasions. Especially in the final third of the book, ... Miaki mixes bitter and sweet deftly, creating a dark chocolatey miasma you can't help but read again and again.

This is one of only a handful of books I have ever bought and I am probably going to buy it in Japanese at some point. I number it among a select few that genuinely changed my life.

*Spoilers*

This novel is held in high regard, but it has major problems. The scenario is questionable, but not hard to get over. The main issue is that the author somehow manages to contradict everything he was trying to teach us throughout the majority of the book with an ending that's just trying too hard.

The scenario is that the attractive young love interest Miyagi is magically paired with the MC Kusunoki, with her having to be around him constantly due to circumstances. Even without changing the initial premise of selling your lifespan, was this the best way to bring the two main characters together? Maybe I'm ... just not the target audience for romance novels, but I can admit the following story was well put-together and had more than a few pleasant moments until the ending.

During the ending Miyagi sells the rest of her lifespan to die at the same time as Kusunoki because although the overarching message of the book is that love and life are precious things that you shouldn't take for granted, why use the memory of Kusunoki to enrich your life in the future when you can have what is essentially a glorified lover's suicide?

Even if the rest of Miyagi's life is valued at a low price, it's admitted in the story that subjective happiness plays no role in deciding a lifespan's value, and instead its worth is decided by objective wealth and influence. Wasn't another message that this book tries to send is that personal happiness is more important than any fame or fortune, demonstrated when Kusunoki says, "and more than the meaningful thirty days I should have spent, these last three days will be the most precious of them all."?

It's contradictory to everything else the author was trying to say. They wouldn't have been able to spend the last three days together if she hadn't sold her lifespan, but this novel would've been far more applicable to the real world if there was an epilogue about Miyagi dealing with feelings of grief and eventually moving on, because in the real world we don't get to leave things off on a high note, we have to clean up after ourselves.

This novel isn't hard to enjoy, but the ending snuffs out a large amount of potential this book had to be something I would think about for years to come.

Weapons grade escapism about a government mandated gf assigned to a suicidal 20-something guy. The mandated gf is invisible to everyone else and needs to be glued the MC's side at all times. At one point the guy considers raping the mandated gf but don't worry, she's pretty chill about it. She's kind of depressed too, just like you always imagined she'd be. There's even a bonus Lars and the Real Girl angle where everyone in the community becomes fond of the MC's eccentricity as they watch him interact with his invisible gf--how fortunate that he can both find love and become a beloved facet ... of his community in one swoop. I guess I'm not sure what I expected.

The message about the value of your time actually hits home but it unfortunately buckles under the weight of sheer escapism. We spend time with other people daily. They are not all our age, or attractive, or attracted to us, but they still help create the little moments that make up those three days that we'd sell a lifetime to live through again. Not only that, but it's in those small moments that we may find avenues for deeper connection and romance. This manga takes an opposite approach, offering the promise of a perfect, convenient romance that transforms you into the selfless, glowing person that you genuinely could be. The formula's just perniciously wrong.