Wanitokagegisu

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10/10. I liked it, here's why:
This manga starts with our hero realising two things: 1) he is alone in his life and 2) he will die. This is a crossroads for him . Dumbstruck by the fear of being alone and by the fear of death, his only option is to face life and, at the very least, get a friend by the end of the year.
Wanitokagegisu is primarly an existential work. And by that I mean this: in Wanitokagegisu the essence and purpose of humans is not something known and eternal -unlike the popular belief before the industrial revolution-; on the contrary, humans exist ... before they learn about their essence -if there's even one. If our hero, Tomioka, knew beforehand his purpose, dispair wouldn't have taken him when he learned of death. After all, if he knew of a purpose, he would have put his energy towards it way earlier in his life and he wouldn't be terribly afraid of death. Most like in the real world, when Tomioka tries to face the world so that he achieve his new goals in life, the world lays on him several boulders and obstacles that introduce themselves to him as moral dilemmas. At some point Tomioka meets two young men that do know for sure what is important in life, what is the purpose of humans: for one it's money and for the other it's love. Tomioka will have a look at where these roads lead. He also sees the path of pure ascetism and where it leads.
In the start I called Tomioka a hero.
I call him a hero because his raison d'être is trascendental. Though he has certain preferences and inclinations in life that will most likely give him some pleasure; he constantly prefers to do what he believes is the right thing, when certain situations force him to choose between righteousness and enjoyment.
But here's where the genius of Furuya, the mangaka, comes: acting "morally" does not always seem like the best of the choices. In some instances, what he believes is the good thing to do leads him into outright peril or makes him commit even further into doing things he would prefer not to. Even at the very end of some of peripecies and the manga itself, Tomioka ends up in a state of ambiguity regarding any future joy (typical from Furuya) and we are led to believe that it's haging from the most thin thread.

Conclusion: this manga's name means "stomiiformes" and is the name of a genera of deep fish; you know, those that live so deep in the ocean their bodies have adapted to the pressure, to the cold, to the dark; and they're able to produce their own light. At the end of these manga you may come to see Tomioka and some of the other characters as similar to these fishes: they have strange appereances, they live amongst some of the most terrifying beings and sorrounded mostly by darkness except for the light they generate out of themselves. Some of these fishes are beautiful if you look from the right angle.

Finally finished Wanitokagegisu. Weird, I started reading it years ago. Picked it back up in my 30s, and am living a life eerily similar to the protagonists (night shift worker, works alone, apathetic and lonesome)...
That alone made me give it a 9.
If we're being honest, the manga a few issues, mainly dealing with the plot.
Story had quite a few far-fetched scenarios (kinda like Ciguatera). It featured a lot of winding, branching storylines, and introductions of side characters that would suddenly disappear without any reason (I guess like real life?). The most unbelievable part is that a young, beautiful girl would shack up with a total ... no-hoper, bum like him/me :/
Another major issue is that I don't think the author fully explored the themes he was looking at.
Overall, still an enjoyable read. He's one of my all time favourite mangakas. Love his unique art. Started with Ping Pong Club, and moved through his catalogue really fast. Some of the most hilarious manga I've ever read. Really enjoyed Himizu, and wish he could make another "serious" seinen. But, he's a master of this darkly comic, slice of life stuff.
Anyway, does anyone know if any scanlators are doing his new(er) work? Saw someone tweet something really positive about Saltiness and the synopsis looks right up my alley.

tl;dr: A manga about a man going through an existential crisis that’s relatable, but ultimately doesn’t seem to convey anything.

Tomioka Yuji is a 32 year old security guard that has been working the night shift for seven years. It’s a very lonely job but even before that he’s always been alone, not really having friends or anything of the sort. The thing is that he never really paid much attention to things, just going with the flow, so when he realizes the state of his life he is utterly shocked and decided that he wants to change and no longer be lonely. As such, this ... is essentially the story of someone going through an existential crisis.

The writing does a good job of building up Tomioka as a protagonist that the reader can empathize with and thus it’s enjoyable enough to watch his story unfold. But it doesn’t really ever feel like it does anything to cash in on that empathy to hit any particularly strong emotional beats. Ultimately, in the end he’s no longer lonely. However, it really doesn’t feel that any of this is due to anything he himself did. Throughout the manga he talks a lot about changing and does go through a lot of introspection. But when it actually comes time to act on things, he never follows through. Who he is at the end of the manga is essentially the same person he is at the beginning of the manga. The only reason his life changes and gets better is due to how he gets pulled into events involving other characters that change the circumstances of his life for him essentially.

To be clear it’s not like this is wish fulfillment or anything like that. Though the manga has a general air of comedy and dark comedy, the events he gets pulled into are genuinely horrible and the type of events any sane person would try to avoid. But somehow they always make things better for him regardless of how badly he handles them. I suppose that’s actually not that rare in fiction, but it usually involves a less realistic setting. There’s this weird tonal dissonance here because the setting is a lot more grounded. But at the same time it’s also pretty absurd all the insanity that he gets involved in. The end result of all this is that it doesn’t feel like particularly well written social commentary, but it’s also not really a feel good story either. It kind of feels like it’s trying to do both and I suppose it manages to do both to an okay degree, but neither particularly well.

The writing also doesn’t handle the rest of the cast all that well either. The love interest, Hada, was really interesting at first because she’s just as weird as Tomioka. Early on the manga often switched to her point of view so that it was easy to see what was going through her mind and that was a lot of fun. However, as the story progresses, this stops happening as much and thus she becomes a character that’s far more difficult to understand and thus hard to relate to or get invested in. The ending sequence switches to her point of view again, but it’s so sudden and laid out so strangely it’s pretty confusing and to be honest I’m not entirely sure what it was trying to do. The rest of the cast are handled even worse, being entirely shallow and basically disappearing completely after their short part in the story is over.

The art is kind of rough in general and facial expressions can look pretty awful, but that fits the type of story pretty well. It also can look nice when it tries to, but it rarely has any need to do so so there’s not much of it.