Ore wa Mada Honki Dashitenai dake
I'll Give It My All...Tomorrow

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This is a manga written for adults.
If you are going through a quarter life crisis or mid life crisis, hate your job or plain lost in life, this manga is for you.
It depicts the challenge of everyday struggles most people can identify with and makes you feel like less of a failure by pretty much saying everybody around you feels the same way, fighting their own battles and suffering alone. And then it shows the story of how someone (who friends and family have pretty much relegated to the loser basket) can achieve a small success through sheer determination and self-belief, and how much ... of a motivation this is to the people around him. And that small successes can be as important and inspiring as big ones.
This manga has a good message to spread about life.
The art is hilarious and so are parts of the story.
It will keep surprising you.

Mod Note: This review was initially posted for the one-shot, Ikiru, and was subsequently merged into Ore wa Mada Honki Dashitenai dake.

"My short story will slither into the crevices of your heart."

Unorthodox one-shots never fail to amaze me. Such was the case of Ikiru, a (very short) manga spanning 23 pages. Most people think that you can never achieve anything spectacular or worth remembering when works are brief. The same kind of crowd also probably have never seen Fumiko no Kokuhaku and She and Her Cat. They have never read White Clouds or Moyashi Fuufu.

Although not as well-known as some of those titles said above, ... Ikiru actually makes an impact like them, albeit on a completely different scale. We have two main characters, one at the height of 'middle age'; and the other, just slightly graduated from twenty. They meet in a totally unceremonious manner. The girl is suicidal. Okay, enough of the "naked" content. You can't give away much if you're talking about a one shot.

Twenty-three pages? It contained the frustrations of youth, a dose of half-life crisis, desperation, weird out-of-the-blue dialogues, radical questions, a taste of violence, a peek on a troubled person's everyday life, and some flashbacks that slid through even though it's not that proper for a one shot to have recollections (mostly it wastes good pages). Seriously, how many short works can pull that off and leave a lasting impression?

I can't wholeheartedly say that the art is eye-candy. On the contrary, the male protagonist kind of looks like a hobo, and his smile is not at all pleasing to see. However, the girl's dark, deep eyes are just.. haunting. The manga is not full of watery-eyed lovesick adolescents, if you're looking for them.

It has its flaws, yes. That's to be expected from one-shots, none of them are perfect. Actually, I would've just let this pass if not for the last lines of the manga. The trigger that pushed me to write this review. I want everyone to read the ending conversation, which happens to be one of the most ponder-worthy exchange of words I have read in a long while.

Go on, make sense of it.

I think there are quite a few mangas that portray the middle-aged salaryman having a mid-life crisis, but perhaps not one quite like this. Perhaps that is because, for all the talk about pursuing dreams, the main character is not a very admirable man that you would expect from these kinds of stories. Rather, he is a self-absorbed slacker and all-around loser, with a passion that fades as quickly as it burns. The other main characters are equally amounts pitiful, chasing happiness that almost seems unattainable. There is a very dark comedy to these aspects of the story, as well as a general melancholy that ... follows every character. In some ways, that makes the story feel more "real," but it also makes it feel like you're just reading a story about hopelessness. That's why when the story itself chooses to end on a more obvious hopeful note, I am not sure if that was the correct decision. Perhaps it would have been better to keep the implications subtle, but that I just a personal opinion on my part.