What is true happiness? How do you find happiness?

We live in a world where the phrase "Sold their soul to the devil" is thrown around pretty often. When an artist blows up and gains any sort of popularity people assume that artist sold their soul to the devil. Stuff like this makes me wonder if selling your soul for fame and money is worth it. The answer was always "yes", the average life span in the US is 80, selling 10-20 years of your life isn't too bad. You will still be able to live to the age of 60 or 70, rich as fuck. Three Days Of Happiness completely contradicts what I thought. Three days of Happiness explores the idea of selling your life for materialistic gain and seeing if that materialistic gain can bring happiness, ambition, purpose, and hope back into your life.

This manga follows a protagonist who has hit rock bottom, he's broke, friendless, depressed, and has no aspirations. One day he decides to sell his life for money. Before you sell your life in Three Days Of Happiness there are the "higher-ups" who decide your worth, which never really occurred to me until now. How much is a person's life worth? How much is your life worth? Is selling your life for momentary gain worth it? How long will you even live? Hopefully, you are not as unfortunate as the protagonist because his sad sad life is only worth 10,000 yen a year, which is 100 US dollars a year. He decides to sell 30 years of his life which leaves him with a total of 3 months to live. Now we follow the main character as he tries to make the last 3 months of his life worth living.

Going into this manga I expected to see a story that would be very rushed, after all this manga only has 16 chapters, and each chapter consists of 25-30 pages. "How can the author possibly resolve everything within 16 chapters," I asked myself. Well, that's when I realize the author's goal was never to give the protagonist a happy ending where he makes up with everyone from the past. Instead, we received a very bittersweet ending. you cant always fix the mistakes you made in the past, and that's okay, you just gotta move forward.

As the story goes on, sadly the protagonist Kusunoki fails in trying to find purpose, the only people he cared about don't care about him. The only person he wanted to see has now despised him. Now he truly has no purpose, the only person he can talk to is his observer Miyagi, an invisible girl whose only objective is to observe Kusunoki as he lives his last few months. Every morning when Kusunoki woke up Miyagi asks " Mr. Kusunoki, how will you spend your day?" This question alone makes me realize how precious each day is, it makes me realize if living a repetitive frivolous lifestyle is really what I want to be doing? But then again, it's not like I can get up and travel the world, I need money. What I'm saying is materialistic things can be valuable for one's own happiness.

As the story progress, Miyagi and Kusunoki's romantic story develops, their character also develops as well. Kusunoki goes from denying the fact his life is worthless and meaningless to accepting it, he realizes not everybody in the world needs to be rich or famous, not everybody in the world needs to fulfill their childhood dreams, not everybody in the world needs to be the next Mohammed Ali, Michael Jordan, or Abraham Lincoln. It's perfectly okay to be a background character that no one cares about as long as you're happy and content with your life. Miyagi goes from a blunt, cold-hearted person to someone who turns out to be really thoughtful and caring. In the end, these 2 made the best memories they could possibly make, and they lived a very happy 2 months by being there for one another. Even when he only had 3,000 dollars he lived his life to the fullest. You don't always need materialistic things in order to achieve happiness. But it would be nice to be rich and live a life where you don't have to worry about income.

Ultimately I was very satisfied with "Three Days Of Happiness" this manga made me question my life and just life, in general. More than any manga or anime I have read/seen in the last few weeks. I never realized a manga with only 16 chapters could have this much impact on a person. I'm not saying your life will be great after reading this manga, what I'm saying is this manga will definitely make you self-reflect.

P.S, Fuck Himeno.