Onanie Master Kurosawa

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Onani Master Kurosawa is something entirely different than what you see at first glance. If you are expecting something erotic or funny, you are looking in the wrong place. Those that can get past the synopsis and exposition will be rewarded, as when you reach the real bulk of the story you will realize just what it has to offer.

It is no secret that this manga deals with mature themes. The problem lies within the fact that it paints the wrong picture for potential readers. The focus is not to be sexually explicit. Rather, it is presented to us in a way that is very ... conservative. It shows nothing more than what is necessary to get the point across. In the big picture, this is not a perverted manga in any sense. It is sweet, heartbreaking, and inspiring.

The story quickly lays the foundation for a school-life setting with a character who has a secret "daily routine". Our main protagonist, Kurosawa, is a guy who cares nothing for interaction with others. He has no friends and has never fallen in love. He converses the minimal amount to simply maintain relations. What he doesn't know is that his seemingly harmless ritual is about to become something that weighs more heavily on him than he could imagine. This story shows us just what can happen when you get in over your head, the consequences of your actions, realizing what you want in life, and much more. Once the plot picks up, you will find yourself always wanting to know what will happen next. The contents are never predictable, and every bit of it is believable. It controls your emotions like a puppet on strings. It will make you feel.

The art is sketched, fitting in perfectly with the mood of the manga. It does a great job of showing character's expressions, using many close-ups and careful shading. Much of the emphasis is on the characters, so the backgrounds are usually simple or non-existent. Overall it is very clean and should bear no complaints.

Characterization is simply amazing. No matter how perverted Kurosawa is portrayed, the fact still remains that he is an incredibly well-rounded, believable, and likable character. The manga has the ability to create Kurosawa as if he were a character born from your own thoughts. While I am not referring to perverted thoughts, his reactions to a given situation are so real that you often think and feel the same way. I felt his anger when he was betrayed, I felt his hopelessness during his hard times, and I felt his happiness when something warmed his heart. Over the course of the plot, Kurosawa changes slowly into an entirely different person. He begins as an introverted kid who violates people in his thoughts with masturbation, yet in the end he becomes undeniably mature. He battles with self-realization, learns of consequences, finds the good in people, and comes to understand what he wants in life. Without a doubt, he is a character that will fill you with emotion.

If any manga is capable of changing my view on a character, it is this one. It does not just tell you how someone feels, it places you in the shoes of a person and allows you to understand it from their point of view. Even if you think a character will play a generally small part, they always end up coming back and influencing Kurosawa in some way. We are allowed to see every character's true thoughts, whether it be directly shown to us or revealed through Kurosawa's deductions. However, you will never feel as though you can predict a character's actions. While they surprise you, every bit of it is believable. This is what depth is all about.

Overall, Onani Master Kurosawa is definitely something you will appreciate reading to the end. It brings us a small introduction and builds off of itself, constantly raising the bar. It gives us a surprisingly large impact that can be found in few other places. To sum it up, it is simply a work of art.

After reading multiple comments and reviews about how much of a masterpiece this is, I just had to give it a try for myself... and I am extremely disappointed. I feel like I wasted my a good few hours of my life.

Here's my disclaimer: I'm not saying this story is bad in any way. The art is decent, the plot is better than most manga, and so are the characters. But it is not a masterpiece. It is not some kind of "Catcher in the Rye". It's a cliche story that happens to dwell a little bit deeper.


As for the theme and lesson in ... the manga, I learned nothing. It shed no light on me. I felt nothing but anger, rage, and fucking annoyance towards the main male lead and various characters. All I got out of it was the overused cliche that being a good Samaritan will bring joy, that being a loner is the worst thing ever and friends are the best thing in the world, and that everyone can be redeemed, but those themes are used so many times and repeatedly told by so many people that the depth in its meaning has worn away.

One of the problems I have with it is that the characters talk like they're writing a fucking essay to please a teacher by trying to sound intelligent. Here's some direct quotes: "In my deduction, there's no solid evidence linking you... the foundations for..." (bits are left out to avoid minor spoilers) When was the last time you heard someone begin with, "In my deduction..." or use the words "the foundations for..." outside of speeches and essays?

Furthermore, the main lead shows no sign of intelligence whatsoever (despite him supposedly being very much above average in smarts), other than the fact that he can carry out plots perfectly without a single ounce of suspicion and use his Light Yagami deductive reasoning. (which by the way, does not work in the real world) His taste for books has nothing to do with the story whatsoever, and the book discussions he had were pointless and empty. The only way one can argue for him being above average in intelligence is admitting that everyone else in the story are DUMB AS FUCK. After all the shit he pulls, which, if I may add, are harassment-- SEXUAL HARASSMENT, he's not in fucking juvenile hall and the school took little measures to look into them.

Because his actions and personality are controversial, it's easy to perceive them as depth, but they're not. A good character is a character that is realistic and three dimensional. Having a few quirks does not create three dimensions, and actually, if the quirks are misused, it can backfire. With this in mind, I can argue that Kurosawa is not a 3-D, realistic character because his former character flaws are completely overwritten with his redemption (which was fueled by the most stupid, random plot device ever) and his actions that negatively affected himself and others all become resolved.

Every part of this story was all for a single point: the main lead's character development(which was terrible and crashed his entire character). His flaws served no other purpose and the same goes for the other characters; they exist only to fuel the lead. His development was pure wish fulfillment.


Then there's the ending. That's what did this story in for me. The god shitting ending. I can't go into details though, because I don't want to spoil it.

This story is NOT controversial. It's deeper only by an inch from the usual. Again, I'm not that saying you shouldn't read it, and not saying it's bad per se, just not... brilliant and definitely not a masterpiece as all those mangahere comments claim.

Disclaimer: this review contain mild spoilers. Read with caution if you haven’t completed the manga.

Onani Master Kurosawa features the activities of a 14-year old as he indulges in a daily masturbatory routine in the girls restroom at school. As the story thoughtfully follows his inner monologues, we quickly get to see him depicted as a rather cold individual who only thinks about his classmates as potential material for his concupiscent pleasures, not even showing any sign of doubt or shame in the process. This is as far as the wacky premise goes, but for the story to advance we’re introduced to another character, this ... time an introvert girl who is object of constant bullying, and who seemingly endures it as best as she can.

The story unfolds in quite of a simple manner, since it mainly contains two major twists that transform our protagonist into a different character. First off, we have the harmless edgy wanker. It’s all in his head. Then, circumstances turn him into a cultivator who runs errands. His seed is all over the place. And finally, the mixture of a monk and best-dude-on-Earth who redeems his mistakes and becomes a great person, because there’s nothing quite like the confidence you can achieve when you know that everyone else is aware of how pathetic you are, and that you certainly can’t get any lower than you currently are (more on this later).

After being an observer of the bullying throughout the weeks, a certain event manages to annoy our protagonist, after which he decides to punish the bullies by spraying his sperm over their gym clothes. This doesn’t come as an act of sympathy, but simply as a response due to his selfish motives and being disgusted by what he saw in class.

Effectively, that solves nothing. He even admits that as far as the bullies is concerned, odds are they would think the responsible is a male who pitied the bullied girl, further isolating any option to actually help her. The twist here is that the latter suspected him all along, disclosing a completely different facet of her personality, one that will try to get revenge, yes, but without dirtying her hands – rather extorting the MC to do it himself.

Kurosawa then becomes a puppet, much to his disdain, but at the same time he enjoys it. We see him depicted as both Yagami Light and Lelouch, the dude being at the peak of his game right now. That’s until he meets a girl that makes his penis feel conflicted. Yes, that's how he first notices it. That’s… Love, we have to assume. You can see them sharing memories of their past, talking about books; it’s all really nice, albeit funnily stereotypical. That until this girl decides to have feelings of her own.

Our "poor" protagonist becomes an even more despicable character after going through this sort of NTR-experience first hand, who’d punish this girl for not looking his way, or would ignore his friend – if he ever was one to start with, I don’t get why Nagaoka would be so clingy to a dude that never showed any sort of interest in him–. After finally noticing he was wrong, he decides to go the hard way, confessing it was him in front of everyone.
Everything that happens after, really falls into some exercise of self-congratulation and pandering that I can’t simply stomach. While he does get bullied to a certain extent, there's a reason for it and is not unfounded as it usually is. He adopts an attitude of calmly taking it as part of his redemption, yet he still has the liberty to compare himself with Kitahara. If the manga ever tried to make any actual commentary on bullying, this is completely counterproductive, since Kurosawa is no victim at all.

Another change in his character that we have to endorse is that he gets more confident and sociable thanks to these events. Why does one of the original bullies who suffered from his acts start fooling around with him? Why does he get the approval of his teacher, this one going as far as to confess him he used to steal underwear in his teens? Why does Nagaoka not show any kind of self-respect at all after he treated him like garbage and pranked his girlfriend out of sheer jealousy?
So many questions without a reasonable answer.

With an awful visual appeal, an outstandingly horrid premise and characterization, and an even more disconcerting closure, Onani Master Kurosawa is in by itself a metaphor of the main activity of its protagonist.