Every kind of media has what we refer to as "masterpieces". They are usually few and far between, not to mention that they're mostly hard to find. Well, scrolling through anilist's recommendations, I recently found a manga that I feel is more than worthy of the title of masterpiece. Let me tell you about it.
"Sayonara Rose Garden".
Just the title alone is enough to make your heart skip a beat. It's concise, on point, and extremely poetic, so much that it's not hard for me to imagine it being a short poem. That same title, paired with its gorgeous cover art, is what first got me to read this manga. At first I just liked how it looked, but it was not long until I got completely invested in the story.
Speaking of story, here's a short summary of it. Sayonara Rose Garden is a yuri manga with an historical setting of 1900's England which follows the thorny love story between Alice, an english noblewoman, and her maid Hanako, a japanese girl who came to England to look for an author she looks up to.
This story was clearly written after a whole lot of research. This is proven by the fact that both the historical setting and the yuri features of it are really well done. The happenings in the story happen together with real historical events, helping the viewer get invested in the story, and, at the same time, the yuri sections of the story are great at setting the dramatic mood that this manga goes for.
The cover art was indeed really good, as I stated in the first paragraphs, but it also keeps that level of quality in the actual chapters. The drawings are very emotional, poetic and full of details, which I find incredible considering how the chapters are structured.
The chapters are in fact quite long, around 30 to 40 pages each. This is balanced by there being only 17 chapters, keeping the story to a fairly normal lenght.
Once I first finished this manga, I was left without breath. It was a while since I had experienced such an emotional story, about 5 years actually, so I got hit really hard. I have no doubt that this is the best manga I've ever read, and I greatly suggest that you also give it a shot.
The story was good, both captivating from an historical point of view and a fictional point of view, having the best out of the two worlds. The happenings of the story and the way they smoothly connected was incredible, not to mention that the closer I got to the end, the stronger the storm of emotions each chapter hit me with was.
To close this off, I'm really glad that I got to read this manga, and I believe this deserves nothing less than a full 100 out of 100, as well as the biggest recommendation I could possibly ever give to a manga.
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