Watashi no Otto wa Reitouko ni Nemutteiru is a cursed 2020 manga by Takaru Hyaku. The english translation of that title basically being… my goddamned husband is dead and in my freezer. So that automatically pretty much sets the stage for the sort of manga that you’re in store for, and of course is why I read it.
However, if before I had read it, you had told me that this manga was actually based off of some hacky soap drama TV show, I would have definitely believed you. However, it instead spawned one I guess???
Makes perfect sense, because all I could think of while reading that manga was that it would probably work better as that. ~~Mind you, I of course didn’t watch the show so I can’t actually vouch for that.~~ What made less sense is no apparently this manga is based off of some web novel I guess by Hachigatsu Misaki.
Even for like a web novel... how do you stretch this story out that long? The manga’s super short, you can pretty much breeze through it no problem. For a TV show all the scenes are actually acted and of course you can pad that shit out and have the twists and shit be cliffhangers for the next episode and etc and that makes sense. A web novel??? Of this???
“My husband was abusive so I fucking murdered him and put him in my freezer in the shed out back but oh no, my husband’s back! But his corpse is still in the freezer! I don’t understand what’s going on!”
and then it just kind of goes on and on like that for thousands and thousands of words
There’s not… I don’t consider this a spoiler at all by the way, there’s just not enough twists. The twists that are there are just so obvious and stupid… they’re basically what you immediately think of.
Like “oh, is it gonna be this???”
But I, the constant optimist, for whatever reason was kind of engaged by this manga and genuinely wanted to see what it was gonna be! Because you know… I like murder! And I like… well, actually…
The whole jist of the thing is that the wife murders her husband because he's genuinely horrible to her, abusive, and just genuinely seems like he's a different person compared to the person she married. And then of course she ends up seeing oh, her husband's still alive! But wait, her husband's also still in the freezer though. How is that possible?
Could it... could it be... twins?
No, no! That's too stupid and predictable! Come on! Give the original author some credit! Maybe the living husband is actually a ghost or it's like some psychological shit where the living husband doesn't really exist and it's actually the guilt she feels from her murder fucking with her because even though her husband was a horrible person and abusing her, murder's still kind of a huge deal!
But that really doesn't make sense because she's obviously really happy that he's gone. Which makes sense because again, he was beyond horrible to her so okay fine, she's completely remorseless. But then when this new husband shows up and upon confirming that she really does still have a corpse in her shed freezer, she basically immediately jumps to... I don't know who this person who basically is exactly my husband is or if he's his ghost, but I'm going to fucking murder him too.
That by itself is kind of... maybe she should confirm what the fuck is even happening before murdering her husband twice? But then she escalates it and goes actually, I'LL FEED THE CORPSE OF THE FIRST HUSBAND TO THE SECOND ONE.
And it's at that point where the horror neurons in my brain started firing off. Jumped from "ah man, my husband was probably cheating with the older lady living next door" which is typical generic soap shit to not just cannibalism. But involuntary self-cannibalism???
At this point the manga really stomps on the gas pedal of demonizing the husband as much as possible to keep it balanced. I guess probably cheating on her and regularly beating her and raping her ~~(or at the minimum, beating her while they had sex but the way they framed it implied she probably said no and he just started raping her)~~ wasn't enough? We get shown that when the wife is worried that she might have cancer, the husband's immediate reaction was "hey, you have life insurance right? You have life insurance right? I want to get paid once you croak from cancer. HA HA HA."
~~Shouldn't... shouldn't he know that already? Like he's her husband, right? Shouldn't he already know that...?~~
But even that's not enough. How can we push it even further? How about that fun time when the husband literally dragged her off to force her to get an abortion? Like the husband shows a desire to have a child and already has a name picked out...
It's not even an immediate thing. It's not like when she tells her, he goes "actually I changed my mind, let's go get this problem taken care of." It's shown that like just one day she came home from the bakery with like bread crusts and Ryo just gets super fucking annoyed and just drags her outside without telling her why until he's already dragging her down the street.
This manga is insane. I really don't think it's nitpicking to think about this scene for literally two extra seconds more than the author did. Was nobody else at all outside watching this man dragging his crying and screaming pregnant wife down the street and off to the abortion clinic? It was broad daylight.
This wasn't needed. Just having him be normally abusive to her would have been enough. You could have still had some room if you were trying to go for the "oh maybe she still feels bad about it and that's why there's this second Ryo here" thing. But with the forced abortion, if she wasn't 100% justified in murdering him, she definitely is now???
Like after the abortion, he comes into the room and just gives her a wooden doll. Doesn't even say anything. "Well, that was fucked up that I forced you to do that but here, uh, pretend this is our dead child. Maybe it'll make you feel better."
Then later he's like "jesus just get over it already and go back to work! I need money! What's that wooden piece of junk you're clinging on to? Just throw it away already like our child which I forced you to abort!"
...This is one of those special types of manga that I need to include images of just to prove that I'm just not losing my mind. Yeah no, this is an actual manga that exists! I'm not making all of this up! I swear it!
Like why didn't she just immediately stab the second Ryo the moment he showed his face? Literally when he shows back up at first is when she was in the kitchen with a butcher knife. She was being physically and psychologically tortured by this person and even forced to undergo an abortion she very much did not want... who cares if upon returning he's acting all smiley and nice? Stab him in the face.
Sure, the freezer's already full of first husband's remains.
~~The manga later shows this point doesn't even matter, though.~~
It's just so weird that her reaction to his return isn't horror or immediate murder but this weird ass cannibalism plot. Like admittedly, that's what really pulled me into being actually interested in this manga... but it's just so batshit weird. Is it just crazy to think that maybe we should have been shown a single moment where she considered... turning herself in?
The husband absolutely deserved what was coming to him. I mean it's not like she didn't give him another option other than getting murdered. Like after the whole insurance thing, she was like "okay no, your reaction to me saying I might have cancer was not acceptable. I want a divorce."
But then he just rips the divorce papers up in front of her. I'm pretty sure that's not how... marriage works? Like I'm pretty sure there's alternatives if your partner is horribly horribly abusive and literally goes "no, I'm never letting you go. And I'm also going to keep beating you and probably force you to get an abortion in the near future."
Because you know, if you can just force someone to remain married to you no matter what, then why would anyone ever get married?
Okay, we're getting horribly sidetracked here. The point is that... like okay, if the wife had just buried Ryo somewhere normally and the manga had just been about her hoping nobody happened to find him. Like the wife would still be trying to hide her murder but that'd be a lot more understandable, especially with giving the reader all of the flashbacks of how horrible Ryo was. But her deciding to feed his corpse to someone else?
Like that's not something you should have your victim protagonist do? You know, if you want the reader to remain on their side. Tortured wife gets pushed into murdering her husband because she feels like there's no other way out of her marriage without one of them dying... feeding someone an entire corpse's worth of meat to make disposal of the body easier. These two things don't belong together without... like there should have been a scene where she's attempting to bury Ryo but then she almost gets caught and goes "I need another way to get rid of this body!"
Not just have her go "wow it's really weird there's another one of this person I just murdered! I'm going to trick him into eating the corpse!" That's really weird! That's unacceptably weird! To the point where that's all I could think about while the manga's trying to get me to sympathize with her. The manga really should have been about the wife trying to figure out who or what this second Ryo is. But instead, she's just going to pretend everything's okay while giving him lunches full of human meat until all of it's gone so she can just bury the bones in a forest because it'd be easier to bury just bones.
But her plan is to murder the second husband after all the meat's gone, so that means the freezer's just going to get restocked with human meat.
~~So what the fuck's the point? Who is she going to feed the second corpse?~~
So this weird ass game she and her "husband" are playing keeps going on. Meanwhile, the husband's just smiling all the time.
"I know I may have done all of that horrible shit to you, but I'm going to be a good husband from now on! Just think of how I was acting before as if I was just another person. Just another completely different person. JUST ANOTHER COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON. JUST ANOTHER COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON"
But then! A second male character gets introduced! And I'm like... oh... just... go fuck right off. HERE COMES THE LOVE TRIANGLE SOAP DRAMA GARBAGE. The wife had met the second male character at some mixer she went to before she got married but they didn't match and oh wow he just happens to be a co-worker of the husband so the second husband brings him home to dinner after the wife blabbed a bunch of shit to him and blah blah blah.
Really, the second male character doesn't matter at all. He does get probably the best moment of the entire manga where
~~Please ignore the fact that this isn't a horror manga.~~ Was it enough to save the whole manga? No.
But his real purpose is of course to be the person for the wife to confide to. I murdered my husband and now there's an impostor husband and he is evil and I did some real bad shit to you specifically as a result of him but I'm not going to come clean to you about what I did apart from the initial murder because that would make me look really REALLY bad!
So the second male character claims to believe her and they kiss and she foolishly decides to go home and the second husband shows anger for the first time as he demands to know where she went and she freaks out when he presses her on the fact that she hasn't eaten because she doesn't want to eat the human meat because she knows cannibalism is wrong ~~BUT IT'S PERFECTLY OKAY TO MAKE OTHER PEOPLE EAT HUMAN MEAT~~
But then the second husband just calmly says "oh yeah the meat I've been using in our meals isn't from the freezer. It's fine!"
And the wife has the absolute audacity to ask...
...
...Oh, that absolutely vital information that you... probably should have tried to figure out the moment a whole new carbon copy of your dead husband appeared? But instead, you didn't even go all in on committing a second murder but this weird involuntary cannibalism shit?
YEAH MAYBE FINDING OUT WHO THE FUCK THIS GUY ACTUALLY IS WAS IMPORTANT.
But oh no, hold on. The second husband takes her out to the freezer and rather than there being a human corpse sans some meat, it's just meat!
And the wife just fucking loses it and thinks he's going to drag her off to an insane asylum and have her locked away or something so she retreats to the second male character's place and confides in him again and wants to leave with him right away to get the fuck away from her husband ghost but he's not a ghost because we've seen him talk to like... the two other characters we have in this series.
But oh no, the second male character betrayed her and called the second husband to take her home! Even though... even though they kissed before? So the second male character loved (???) her, he just didn't believe any of the crazy shit she was spouting. So when she came back to his place spouting a bunch of crazy shit she just called her husband to come get her... I'd say that's kind of fucked up before I remember EVEN IF SHE DIDN'T INTEND IT, SHE FED HIM A WHOLE BUNCH OF HUMAN MEAT.
Because of course when the second husband comes and gets her, he finally delivers the twist of the manga. And he's looking genuinely hurt while he does it.
It's twins. Twin brothers. Ryo and Sou. Ryo was the bad one, and Sou was the good one. Their mother gave birth to them while fleeing her abusive husband and not wanting them to be known as their father's children, she just opted to not have them be registered. How does that work exactly? Did she just not go to the hospital and had them on her own somehow? Or after giving birth in the hospital she said something to one of the nurses like
"oh hey can you not... put them in the system? Let's just pretend I came in for a check-up and then I just left the hospital with two newborn children?"
"excuse me, ma'am but what the fuck did you even just ask me to do? what???"
THE POINT IS, THE WHOLE MARRIAGE BETWEEN RYO AND OUR PROTAGONIST AS A RESULT, WASN'T EVEN A REAL MARRIAGE. Maybe... maybe, this is a reason why you shouldn't get hitched to some guy you literally meet just standing at the side of the road?
Because maybe he'll not be on the grid and also have a twin brother and he and his twin will decide to start playing a game where they start switching in and out.
And even with the manga stressing that hey Sou's a lot better of a guy than Ryo... he should have immediately stopped this, then.
They were gaslighting the absolute shit out of her. She thought she was in a relationship with one guy, instead, it's two brothers and they're just switching in and out whenever because they thought it was funny how she wouldn't notice the difference.
But eventually things went too far and Ryo told him "alright, well fuck off then if you don't want to gaslight and torture this girl anymore." and so Sou left and let Ryo have her. But hold on. Sou also mentioned he was the one who gave her the wooden doll after Ryo forced her to get an abortion...?
EVEN IF THAT WAS THE IMMEDIATE BREAKING POINT WHERE SOU FINALLY HAD ENOUGH AND LIKE LEFT THE WIFE TO RYO'S DEVICES AFTER GIVING HER THE WOODEN DOLL, THAT'S SO INCREDIBLY FUCKED UP.
She's been going on this whole manga since Sou showed up after Ryo died about wanting to kill this new second Ryo but after being told all this horrible shit and that Sou actually finished off Ryo because he was apparently still alive after she stuffed him in the freezer, she's all like "wow I love you Sou!" and then they get married. For real this time!
...Why? No seriously, fucking why? FORGET THE ANGEL AND DEMON SHIT, THEY'RE BOTH HORRIBLE TERRIBLE HUMAN BEINGS. YOU SHOULD BE HORRIFIED. HE WAS KNOWINGLY PASSING OFF LUNCHES FILLED WITH HIS DEAD BROTHER'S FLESH TO THIS OTHER GUY BECAUSE HE WAS PETTILY ANGRY AT HIM THAT HE GREW UP IN A BETTER ENVIRONMENT.
Speaking of, he's also apparently on the run because he's wanted for questioning in a murder case. Murder case...? What murder case? FUCKING WHAT MURDER CASE?
It never... gets explained... and even if Sou like were to throw second male character under the bus for Ryo's murder then surely he would have had to told the police about Ryo's corpse and he didn't but even if he did how would he explain second male character murdering Ryo and then hiding Ryo's corpse in Sou and his wife's house...
So... the only really sensible explanation is that he's on the hook for a completely unrelated murder...? I don't know. I don't know about anything that is happening in this manga at this point because on top of this, the wife's mother and the older woman neighbor both were apparently aware that the wife was being gaslighted by the brothers? And they... just didn't tell her. Ever. Not once.
Granted they maybe weren't fully aware of the abuse or the abortion but they were aware of Sou's cheating and find it weird she didn't decide to go with Ryo instead.
...Wait, fucking what???
So wait hold on, Sou was actually the one who was cheating? But was Ryo still the one that was being abusive and pushed her into aborting her child? If this last attempt at misleading the reader was to imply that both brothers were awful human beings, I was kind of already there. I want to say it almost feels like the implication the author wants to give is that somehow Ryo was actually the fully good one and Sou was just lying and he somehow tricked Ryo into being in the right place and right time when she decided to try and murder Sou but actually ended up murdering Ryo who in this case would be the good one and
THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T DO THE TWIN TWIST. BEST CASE SCENARIO? OH, WHAT A CHEAP TWIST. WORST CASE SCENARIO, OH THIS MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE AND I'M FURTHER MUDDYING THE WATERS BY THROWING THE IMPLICATION THAT IT'S THE ACTUALLY THE BAD TWIN WHO SURVIVED THE TWIN OFF!
You know what? It doesn't even matter. The way the manga ends is that she and Sou who may or may not be the good twin get married, they move away, she gives birth to twins, and then she alone moves back to her old house. And Sou's just gone after the timeskip.
Because she thinks twins should always remain together and the last panel of the manga is of the freezer. Because... because both Sou and Ryo are in the freezer. Because the title isn't referring to Ryo because she and Ryo were never officially married but she did officially marry Sou and then afterward murdered him and now he's sleeping in the freezer with his brother. ~~Although, Sou said he moved Ryo (or I guess at least his head?) to under the tatami when he was pranking her and making her think that the meat in the freezer was just normal meat... so I'm assuming she put him back in the freezer because if she just left him under there at room temperature he definitely would start rotting surely...~~
I fucking hate this manga.
I genuinely wanted to see where this was going to go. I even kind of forgave the twin twist even though it was the first thing I immediately thought of because of how insanely fucked up and stupid it ended up being. At first, the wife even reacted how she should have reacted. "What do you mean my marriage was a sham and you twins were taking turns? Why the fuck would you do such a horrible thing?"
But then she immediately goes "oh you finished off Ryo? thank you, Sou! I love you!" and then we're purposely shown that two of the three other characters that exist in this manga knew that Ryo had a twin this whole time making the wife look absolutely stupid. And then after she asks Sou "no I know we got married for real and all but who the fuck are you really?"
Cue transition to timeskip and bam.
Her twins are born, Sou's gone, and the wife's acting completely different to how she's been the entire manga. Why not show her murdering Sou? That was your one job! The twist of the wife murdering Sou anyways after marrying him is completely ineffective because we don't care that she murdered him. If anything, she should have murdered him much sooner because even putting the gaslighting thing aside, Sou's a huge asshole anyways.
Like I know her mother is there with her at the end, but she should be acting like how she was acting at the start of the manga when she thought she had killed Ryo.
"Oh thank god, these piece of shit brothers who have manipulated me for fun, abused me, and ruined my life are finally both dead."
Not:
"That's where you belong, Sou. With your dead twin brother. Which is a really unfortunate sort of thing to say given that I now have twin sons. I guess I need to find somebody new to feed all that meat to. Wait... hold on... I need to go make a quick google search real quick..."
That without a doubt has to be one of the darkest implications a manga has ever left me with upon ending. But what the hell else is she going to do with the meat???
#Conclusion#
An absolute roaring dumpster fire. But this manga is the kind of dumpster fire that's hard to even enjoy. Because it's just so utterly incomprehensible. The obvious early twist is obvious and thus it's silly that's what it actually ended up being, the final twist is just infuriating and makes the wife character completely unlikable and honestly kind of creepy. Because she had plenty of time and opportunities to murder Sou where it would have made sense and honestly she would have been pretty justified. But she only did it when she knew he was seemingly fully in love with her and wrapped around her finger which would be fitting if she had demonstrated she was capable of being that manipulative at any point throughout the rest of the manga.
The extent to which she was gaslit not only by the brothers but also as it turns out the people around her is just fucking crazy and honestly awful. This is one of those wild manga where pretty much every single character is just a horrible or so flawed to the point I can't even bring myself to like any of them. And the fact that the cannibalism actually ends up becoming such a minor point that it just kind of falls down by the wayside to the point of the wife has to actually go "oh hey wait, Sou why the fuck did you even do that to that guy?" at the end is just wild.
This manga is just a disaster and upon thinking about it further than I probably should have broke my brain and resulted in this absolute mess of a review. So I'm giving it a 2 out of 10.
I still might have been willing to recommend it as I found the act of reading it and trying to guess where it was heading fun but... the ending is just so bad.
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