Kiku

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Very simple, very short delinquent manga.
If you've read this type of manga before you know what you're getting into. Not much depth as it is only 7 chapters long, and it focuses more on giving you the "delinquent feeling" other than telling some kind of grandiose story.

There's not much to talk about that won't spoil the little content this manga has, but the synopsis is very much all there is to it.

Art is good, characters (or character I should say) are good, and it's a fast read.
Me personally, I thought it was very nice, as some of Kiku's thoughts are things that hit pretty close ... to home for me, but I also recognize not everyone will have the same feeling.
All in all you don't lose anything but a few minutes for reading this one, so if you're interested I'd say go for it.

I always like to say "you can throw great characters in any mediocre story and that mediocre story will transform into something good", and Kiku is a close example of that, for me.

Kiku is a very simple, short, and sweet story about being lost in life during your teens, and longing to be part of something. Almost everyone lived through something similar, although not always in a delinquent and rebellious fashion, but to live through it means to grow, but I digress. The manga manages to tell this story and purvey its message in a pretty fun and enjoyable way.

The story is your run-of-the-mill school ... of delinquents, and it doesn't get any deeper than this. What I did love about it, though, was the journey (let's put it that way). The characters are far from amazing and incredibly deep, but they serve their purpose with flying colors. And the interactions between them are what makes this manga stand out and be a little more than a school delinquents/troubled youth manga.
Kiku presents a very simple message of friendship, with the classic "everything is better with friends, no matter what". And even though it is a very common underlying theme in the genre, it was the execution that made it enjoyable for me, personally. It's a very, very nice story about teens being teens.

Apart from the art sometimes making teenagers look like adults, and an abrupt ending, I have nothing really bad to say about this manga.

So, to wrap it up: Kiku is extremely short, so I do recommend you read. I left my reading session with a good feeling of "it was worth my time" and I hope you'll feel the same.

There really isn't much to say about this series to be completely honest.

It's extremely short, so all it was trying to do is to give a message within the span of 1 volume instead of exploring what it's trying to tell. Nothing about it particularly stands out, there was no real plot and the characters were flat and identical to one another. There were no interesting storytelling gimmick since the main character, Kiku, spells out the themes of the manga for you every time he has an inner monologue. It's also one of Takahashi Hiroshi's first manga, so the art wasn't anything amazing like ... his later works either. It's just...incredibly average.

Overall it's something you can easily breeze through in half an hour and forget most of it in a matter of days. Despite that however, it's a good gateway to start getting into Takahashi Hiroshi's manga, for it does give you a good idea of what type of story he usually tells.