I think that the stories that I consider most apprehensive and most dreadful are the ones that borrow elements of familiarity from the real world and then distort them. books have first party access to the mind of the reader. unlike visual works, they can leave a lot of negative space just like novels — although they have the upper hand there — to trust that the readers' psyche crafts something more terrifying than pages would allow in the thinking frame of the audience. and just like junji ito's manic obsession with spirals, asano leverages a much more niche weapon of familiarity — banality and the mundane.

oyasumi punpun poses the question every growing adolescent has to ask themselves at some point, as uneasy as it might be for many: what if I don't become what I want to be in the future. what if life doesn't give me the things I ask of it. what if — "there's no point in asking the what ifs" a broken punpun would say later in the final chapters, and it's a genuinely harrowing experience for growing adults see as punpun think of those questions, seeing himself slowly morph into identities of a god, a monster and ultimately as nothing when he allows the "what ifs" to define him.

punpun is a deeply human story about our anxieties, and it's one that reminds you of them as you stare off the ceiling, your mind blank with nothing to think about other than where exactly your life is going. we see punpun do the same, but with a shorter scope as most would probably have. he spent much of his time — when he's not beating himself up for decisions —measuring himself by the distance of the person he wanted to become and the person he was now, and because humans are dreaming creatures, that weight crushes him into despair, into never being able to fully live in the present. always anxious of the future, always terrified of the loose cords left in the past. and punpun is never able to make resolutions because he's scared, so he keeps to himself the things he doesn't want to hide. he has idyllic views of what the world should be. and comes to the realization too late that he can't force anything from life than scream at the clouds to rain. and blindsided by what he wants the future to produce, he makes decisions that ultimately compounds and leaves a heap of consequences hovering above him in the endgame.

this book is not for the faint of heart. as it's one that weaponizes the fear of uncertainty, a fear that we are all too familiar with. it uses it so well that a lot of the time you get anxious reading the dialogue of characters because you feel less of an observer and more of a participant. you feel implicated in the conversation like they're not speaking not to you but about you. your most intrusive thoughts are now the characters speaking in the pages wearing human masks. and that's the difference between a causal horror work of junji ito. ito utilizes the uncanny, asano utilizes plausiblity. you're less likely to be apprehensive of spirals in the sky than say, the concept of seeing consequences compound like an averlanche. that's way worse. thats Tuesday.

the manga has its generous share of delusionals who have different ways of romanticising current circumstances they have to deal to with, which reminds us a bit that we the audience also do the same. the most devastating chapters are often the most quiet ones, because asano knows there is no imaginable horror greater than recognizing your own life in the work you're reading. asano leaves you with the question that never answers itself, because answering would be dishonesty "what if you don't become who you thought you would", but the book does hammer to live in the now. to live in the present. because living in the self concept, would, just like punpun, leave you with a burden that makes everything appear meaningless. for punpun, he never reflects, all he does is drift under the burden of shame and regret, and avoidance metastatizes. he let's the shame pilot his life

we all live in bubbles when we peer at our lives carefully, for people in comfort it's harder to see but not impossible to scrutinize. in the post-high-school arc with sachi we see punpun finally stabilize a bit and we get the promise of things getting better. and then everything implodes because punpun is a story about mundanity and entropy. it take just one person/event/accident/offer/circumstance to burst that bubble. and when this compounds and overwhelms, the story toys with the idea of suicide as an escape hatch, a clean exit. but it does not romanticize it. there's no operatic catharsis. all you're left with is just a mess that allows you to look away. burning down the home to kill the rodent is probably going to do just that, but it brings down the home anyway. the aftermath isn't something we get to narrativize, we just continue.

above all, punpun is not a cynical book. it's honest about the fact that we all have different trajectories but not necessarily clean fairytale endings. it's honest about the fact that some futures are "chosen", and many times more than often we only get to negotiate meaning based on the options life gives us, we don't get to decide the rules of the game. "here are the constraints, what are going to do with it?"

for a lot of adolescents growing up, punpun is likely going to hit a little harder, because adolescence is like an unlit corridor. but the manga shouldn't be treated like prophecy, because it features a specific kind of passivity to failure under trauma. oyasumi punpun features sachi, a friend of punpuns who's passivity to emotion ends up silently deciding for her as she refuses acknowledgement. Pegasus' and the religious fanatics passivity to reality, consumed by the desire of being special ended their lives in a mass suicide. the fate punpun depicts feels universal because passivity is universal. but it's not inevitable. and we see punpun himself still moving, still taking roles that are not fully his own, it's not triumphant but it's not Pegasus either. drifting is still motion, which is still a contrast to the cults total abdication. proof that passivity isn't destiny. one group chose the escape hatch, punpun didn't, even though he was faced with limited options to choose from. Just as we, sometimes moving, sometimes uncertain, but often times just like punpun, without the luxury of options, many of which do not offer salvation, only continuation. and continuation, however compromised, is still a choice