Note: The score is marked as 80/100 because that divides to 4/5, which represents how I feel about the manga.

I really like Tatsuki Fujimoto. He's a smart guy, one with a good grasp of psychology and a willingness to place his psychological explorations in settings where people can explode into a million pieces because the dog they adopted was secretly a land mine (or something). Chainsaw Man is a lot of fun, and while the one-shots written before it are a bit rougher around the edges they're still the quintessential Fujimoto formula of heartfelt character moments contextualized with wild horror imagery. But I liked this relatively grounded story more than either of them.

Part of it is just the length. It doesn't go on too long or end before it has the chance to flesh out its story and characters. It's a fantastic little snapshot of friendship, regret, grief and loss. Yes, the tragedy does feel slightly contrived, but the main character's response to it helps to sell the whole thing as natural, which is the mark of a good writer. The way she visualizes the tragedy, imagines how it could have played out differently, wonders about a potential "golden ending" that seems to imply it could never really have been avoided. It gets a bit confusing near the end with panels that don't clearly explain themselves, but then the protagonist is struggling to process the events of the story as well, so I think it does help sell that. It's a very focused work, and I'm happy I read it, because I think shows progress for Fujimoto as a writer.

Fujimoto's main problem is that while he likes to tell human stories with wacky imagery, he's not always good at balancing one with the other, and when the imbalance happens, the zaniness tends to overwhelm the story's emotional core (as it does near the midway point of Chainsaw Man's first arc around the time Santa Claus is introduced). To be honest, I actually preferred the anime version of Chainsaw Man (or, at least, what has been adapted as of May 29th, 2023) even though the animation is worse than Fujimoto's art because the slower pace allowed it to better center the psychological aspects of the story. Then again, Fujimoto worked on the anime too, so maybe I'm just a bigger fan of who Fujimoto is now than who Fujimoto was when he started writing Chainsaw Man.

All this is to to say that Fujimoto is young and rapidly improving his craft, and Look Back is a very touching story without a wasted page or element. I'm looking forward to the day when he manages to create something this focused that also integrates his idiomatic madcap style without having it overwhelm the human parts of the story. In the meantime, read Chainsaw Man, read Fujimoto's one shots, and read Look Back.