There are two things that Riichi Ueshiba makes me think of: intricately detailed, occultly fantastic arc, and offputting, often perverted narratives. Somehow, Ookumo-chan Flashback managed to be his best work despite lacking the former and only having a little of the latter.

Relatively little, that is. The perverted side of the story is at its core, as the protagonist, Minoru, is introduced as being horny for his mother’s ass.

It’s easy to imagine the exact kind of raunchy, offensive, incestuous comedy anime this sounds like — the kind that exists to be horny bait for a relationship it will constantly tease while never quite showing. It’s not one of those. It’s definitely not a romance; the driving force of the narrative is anything but a desire to see them get together. It’s more of a character study, along with an exploration of other relationships. If the premise puts you off enough to keep you from reading it, fair enough, but if you give it a chance, it won't hit you with very many degenerate moments, and will give you a lot more.

Minoru is portrayed realistically and genuinely. It’s simply a matter of fact that he feels that way about his mother. He knows never to act on it, but he can’t control the way he reacts. He shakes his head at himself when he catches himself thinking about it too much, and he never lets his mother find out, sparing the readers an extremely awkward scene. It affects more than just how he looks at his mother, Aya, but seeps into how he interacts with his peers, how he conducts himself socially. After all, he doesn’t need them, or a relationship, when he has her.

He feels that way due to the one fantastical element — Minoru experiences random visions of the past, where he sees through his father’s eyes when he was in high school, crushing on, flirting with, dating his mother. The way he stammered, watched her, spoke to her, and stared at her ass. Those feelings of love rubbed off onto Minoru, mixing with his familial attachment.

It’s weird, but a lot less weird than some of Ueshiba’s past work. His career began with his breakout hit, Discommunication, with incredible, surreal artwork, and an amateurish yet charming story that felt like it was entirely improvised yet never bullshits you. That manga was about love, how it is both simple and incomprehensible, despite the surreal and occult events of the narrative.

After a couple of Discommunication sequels, Ueshiba wrote Yume Tsukai. That was some of the worst and weirdest shit I’ve ever read, jumping between reprehensibly taboo and utterly ridiculous. You probably wouldn’t believe me that its second half was actually good. After that, he wrote Mysterious Girlfriend X, a manga I did not finish and cannot say much about. But I will mention that Ueshiba wrote it to exemplify pure, sex-free relationships between high schoolers. At the same time, he couldn’t stop himself from constantly incorporating a spit fetish.

That should give you a picture of the strange kind of artist he is. Ideas no normal person would come up with, sometimes intriguingly so and sometimes upsettingly so. But love is a common theme. That’s why when he wrote Ookumo-chan Flashback, about a boy horny for his mother, it wasn’t just a raunchy comedy, but a heartfelt look at just how love develops.

Discommunication was a question — just what is love — but Ookumo-chan Flashback isn’t the answer. Because it’s already been figured out. Ookumo-chan is a victory lap, so fluent in its understanding of human behavior and relationships that it can portray love without the fantastical metaphors Ueshiba needed before. Rather than a descent into the mindscape of the universe, Ookumo-chan delivers its message through its portrayal of natural, ordinary life.

Rest assured, the love isn’t between Minoru and his mother. Rather, it’s between Minoru and his classmate, Ninomae. From their first introduction, you’ll be rooting for them to get together, and the manga knows it. But there isn’t one moment where they fall in love, no beautiful moment of passion where feelings are realized and exchanged under the stars as angels sing. There are beautiful moments, but people move on from them, don’t change immediately, all while love slowly builds from the littlest things.

Ninomae is a great character, boisterous and outgoing to complement Minoru’s reservedness. But he can keep up with her, isn’t fazed or intimidated. There’s also the secret of how Minoru’s mother is actually the manga author behind Ninomae’s favorite series, something Minoru wants to keep under wraps to avoid the attention. It lends tension and anticipation to something that otherwise could have been a little too slice of life.

But the use of slice of life is also what grounds this manga and makes it so relatable. It rides the perfect line between drama and daily living. There’s always a point to a chapter, always some slight progression of Minoru and Ninomae’s relationship, never extending it unnecessarily. But that drama is typically something you could experience in your own life. The best slice-of-life understands that ordinary life is interesting, if you know the right way to look at it. It’s often tied together with a vision of the past at the perfect moment, giving parallels between the present and past that are not always between the same characters.

Ueshiba’s writing has matured over his long career. The heightened realities of his earlier work were at times jaw-dropping, but now he can provide an engaging story simply with the relationships alone. Neither approach is inherently better, but for him, the latter has the advantage of experience behind it, and is what makes this manga so good.

His artwork has also matured. The linework is a little bit more loose than in his past work, and it lacks the insane splash panels and immersive magical environments. At his best, he fills pages with details yet never lets them be distracting. But here he proves he doesn’t need those things, because he understands composition, panel flow, and how to use the little aspects of visual storytelling to add that extra punch. His faces used to be some of the simplest you’d see in manga; now he conveys nuanced emotion through facial expressions. The characters now stretch and bend dynamically, posed like human beings and not dolls. Poses themselves are sometimes used for subtle parallels; one of my favorite moments has two character in the exact same position, telling us there’s a connection between them, but the panels occur pages apart. So instead of shoving it in the reader’s face, it’s more like a moment of deja vu, that hits you the same way it hits the character seeing them.

He’s always been an expert at drawing, but now he’s an expert at drawing for a manga.

I think the feeling I felt most while reading it was “I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying this.” This was partially from the context of the author’s past work, the improvement from what he had done. But it was also the way it took a perverted-sounding premise and turned it into something heartfelt. The way it took something that could have been plain, and made it stick with me.

It’s my favorite of Ueshiba’s works, because by the end, you realize there’s a purpose even to the horny premise. Most of us, someday, have to learn to leave behind the love we feel for our parents, and find something new. They will keep being important to us, but someone else can become the most important to you. It heightens that extreme to romantic love to make its point, but at its core it is perhaps the most human thing Ueshiba has written.