Brief spoiler-free review: this is, in my opinion, an absolutely phenomenal manga about the cycle of abuse, bad victims, the truth of love, the way trauma can change a person, and the tragedy of its characters. Its art is gorgeous, it's heavy on symbolism, and it's extremely transgressive. I implore you to read it if you haven't already.

! SPOILERS AHEAD. BE WARNED. CLICK ONLY IF YOU'RE OKAY WITH IT. VAGUE SPOILERS OUTSIDE OF BRACKETS. !

Happy Sugar Life is haunting me.
It has been, really. For over three years now. Rarely does a day go by where I don't think about it at all. If I had to describe this story in genre-ese, it'd be a philosophical psychological horror-romance drama; but like all genre jargon, that doesn't really capture its soul. Most fundamentally, it is a story that will not let you be comfortable — it aggressively confronts you again and again with its moral ambiguity, evocative art, and the ideological clashes of its characters. To read Happy Sugar Life is to be forced to study your own moral compass, and as a result, I can essentially tell what kind of person someone is by the time they finish this series. In order to properly convey my feelings on this story, I'll have to mix some of my own emotions into each part of the review, so do forgive me if you're only here for an idea if you should read or not or a plot summary.

⋆｡°✩OVERVIEW✩°｡⋆

At its most basic level, Happy Sugar Life is a story about the relationship between 16-year-old Matsuzaka Satou — driven, ideological, lovestruck murderess — and Koube Shio, "pure", warm, yet suspicious and discerning child — and the people surrounding them that get drawn into their attempt to find happiness together. Shio has ended up in Satou's apartment under mysterious — at best extralegal — circumstances, and Satou is more than anything unwilling to let Shio go; Satou believes she has at last found true love after meeting Shio, and will do absolutely anything, no matter how morally bankrupt, to hang on to it. Lies, manipulation, theft, murder, anything goes for her. As of the first chapter, she already has multiple bags full of... someone's body parts sitting in an unused room: very literal skeletons in her closet. Unfortunately for her, she's not alone — and she's not the only person looking for Shio.

⋆｡°✩CHARACTERS✩°｡⋆

What is love? We've all heard the stories, but what does it look like really?

What is happiness, to you?

For the sake of reaching that happiness, how far would you go?

These are the central questions that Happy Sugar Life is fascinated with from beginning to end. In service of considering those questions and helping you answer them for yourself, each character represents a view on these questions as they clash throughout the story. The tricky thing about HSL's characters is that, among the main five at least, they are both viciously, diametrically opposed in their goals, and yet difficult to write off as irredeemable or purely monstrous. They all have their own circumstances, their own drives, good and bad qualities.

Matsuzaka Satou:

Satou is the series' main character, and undoubtedly the one we spend the most time with. She carries this story on her 13" shoulders from start to finish, and I hold her very near and dear to my heart.
She is a bitter, misanthropic, empty, neurotic overachiever who has been hurt or abandoned by every single person she was supposed to rely on or be taken care of by — this having severely warped her moral compass — who has, despite all of this, found purpose in her love for Shio. Her hatred towards the rest of the world causes her to engage in a form of borderline escapism together with Shio, playing out a fairy-tale-esque love together inside their apartment and shutting everyone else out as much as humanly possible. She puts up a polite and kind facade around most people, but is frankly a pretty cynical and hateful person that is only truly happy around her 'one and only'.

Up until the beginning of the story and her meeting with Shio, Satou had been known as highly promiscuous, but sex was never really what she was after (she's kind of aggressively sexless in the modern day, if anything). She was searching for the 'one and only' she believed would fix the emptiness in her heart by serially dating a bunch of different guys, as she had been taught to by a certain aunt of hers (who we will circle back to later). This didn't work for her, though, and she's only become the person she is now since meeting Shio under mysterious circumstances.

"Love" to Satou is this sparkling, pure, sexless, gentle, all-encompassing, all-powerful force that has irrevocably changed her life and saved her soul, something she can only feel for one person. She lives for this love alone, having endured a meaningless life of emptiness and abuse up until now, and treats the concept with such zealous religious deference and ideological fervor that — having rejected conventional morality a long time ago — her personal morality is entirely based around what serves and upholds her love.

Despite the less-than-legal circumstances of their meeting, the fact that Satou's love for Shio is partially because of her chasing purity, and the obviously questionable aspects of their relationship, Satou does everything she possibly can to give Shio a happy everyday life: treating her kindly, spending time with her, bathing with her, and working overtime to the point of self-harm at her maid café job in order to afford essentials and gifts for her beloved. Behind the scenes, she also works to blackmail and manipulate anyone threatening to take Shio away from her without Shio's knowledge (whether they're ill-intentioned or not, though she views most of them that way). She will do anything — absolutely anything — to ensure that she's allowed to love Shio in the way she was never loved, to give Shio the life she was never afforded, and to protect their 'castle' of love from any intruders.

She's not exactly perfect with Shio, though — although she grows and fights this impulse over time, she has a nasty possessive streak and an extremely high level of paranoia around losing her that means she really doesn't mind that Shio is forced to stay inside all the time due to her legal situation.

Spoiler, click to view

At the end of things, her fatal flaw is her love, as it is also her strength — her decision to go back for the wedding ring she left in the apartment she and Shio are abandoning, driven by a desire to not let even a single drop of their love go, is what ultimately dooms her to be defeated and forced into suicide by Asahi.

Koube Shio:

Shio is interesting in both a narrative and personal sense. On a narrative level, she is both the story's deuteragonist and the object of others' quests — her surface traits of kindness, warmth and innocence cause her to be sought after by multiple other members of the cast in order to fill the holes in their own hearts like some loli-shaped MacGuffin, from Satou to Taiyou to Asahi. She represents the innocence of a child that Satou and Taiyou hope to regain in some way by being close to her, and the ideal of family togetherness and happiness to Asahi.

At the same time, on a more personal level, this purity is a lie — she's a child of an abusive household, with

Spoiler, click to view

a low-functioning alcoholic of a father and an emotionally unstable mother who was forced to give birth as a teenager.

A fatal blindspot for many of the characters after her is the way they ignore her humanity and agency — even if all she wants is for someone to love and raise her properly without lying to her. Her willing passivity throughout the first half of the story often tricks people into thinking there's not much to her and viewing her in that idealized surface-level way, but beneath that exterior lies a girl with a genuine, well-developed arc; someone whose life circumstances had her on track to turn out like Satou did, before Satou herself threw a wrench in that — and someone who needs to break out of that idealized view other people have of her if she is to finally be able to decide her own fate, and live for herself.

Spoiler, click to view

Additionally, she's less a prisoner to Satou than it may first appear — Satou found her after her mother, unable to handle raising Shio anymore and afraid of becoming her abuser, abandoned Shio in a construction site that Satou was passing by one rainy night; Shio (viewing Satou as the only person that could keep the vows of love she's made with many people) allowed herself to be taken in as Satou's heart began to move for the first time. As a result, I've always seen their relationship as more of an unequal partnership than a Stockholm Syndrome case.

Koube Asahi:

Asahi is Shio's brother, and is currently searching for her after she mysteriously went missing. Where Satou is a somewhat villainous protagonist, Asahi is a relatively heroic antagonist — he's the most straightforwardly moral character, and by far one of the easiest to sympathize with. I certainly know many people who finished the series saying they could only sympathize with him. He shares an unfortunate history of abuse with his sister; however, having not seen the darker sides of his mother as Shio did,

Spoiler, click to view

(he stayed behind to endure the father's abuse to keep his father from coming after his mother and Shio, causing him to miss much of her moral deterioration)

he's become fixated on the idea that only the three of them — him, his mother, and Shio — living together will finally earn him happiness after he's long-suffered for the sake of protecting his family. He believes deeply in the familial bonds he shares with Shio and his mother, and believes Shio was the glue that held them together through so much pain; and so, he hopes to seize her for the sake of fixing their family and finally being able to live a happy life for himself.

To this end, he works himself as hard as Satou — spending all of his little money on printing missing person posters of Shio and sleeping under park benches while he's at it so he can spend as much time as possible searching for her. Despite his drive, Asahi is deathly afraid to use violence in his pursuit of Shio out of fear of becoming like his father — at least at first. Throughout the story, his moral compass deteriorates as he sacrifices more and more of his principles on the altar of finding Shio.

Spoiler, click to view

This tragically comes back to sting him at the end of the story, and exposes his central flaw: (though it's hard to blame him for it, given the little information he had) namely, the lack of thought he gave to Shio's own wishes for her life as a result of his self-centered wish to take her back for his happiness, and the fact that he last saw her when she was young enough that he wasn't spurred to consider it. At the end of his journey, he expected to find his moon, the glue that held their family together — only to find a girl who was done with that family, and could never fix one as fundamentally broken as theirs.

Hida Shouko:

Shouko is Satou's friend (as far as I know, the only real one) and coworker at Cure A Cute café. If I had to use one word to describe her, it'd be 'sheltered'. She's from a relatively affluent family and feels trapped by their stringent regulations, causing her to vent her desire for freedom through one-night stands with boys from around town. She used to go searching for guys to do this with together with Satou, these escapades serving a dual function of being the time they spent hanging out with each other and getting to know each other better.

As a result, since Satou's found her 'one and only' and quit serial dating, she's also begun to drift further apart from Shouko — something that bothers Shouko deeply. Despite her indecisive nature, Shouko knows well that she loves Satou as a friend (something Satou pays attention to and clearly values) and dearly wants to be a part of her life, pushing her to try and get more deeply involved with Satou's throughout the story.

She finds herself lost for much of the first half of the manga, lamenting how scared of everything she seems to be as a result of her lack of exposure to the darker sides of the world, as well as her inability to face things with clear conviction. She does indeed end up way over her head after meeting Asahi and beginning to assist him in his efforts to find Shio — but she views this stumbling around as a necessary step on her road to becoming a braver, better person, fueled by her desire to be strong enough to be trusted by and close to her only true friend Satou, and to help the boy searching for his sister that she's come to care for.

Spoiler, click to view

The dramatic irony of her unwittingly playing both sides of Satou and Asahi's distant chess game and her fear and indecisiveness ultimately catch up to her, though. Her efforts to push into Satou's life result in Satou testing her ability to handle difficult or shocking things by taking Shouko to her aunt's apartment. Afterwards, Satou asks if Shouko will still be her friend, regardless of her relation to such a disgusting person — a question Shouko can only answer by looking away from her friend in silence, having momentarily been unable to see Satou as anything other than a product of her upbringing. This permanently shatters the trust between Satou and Shouko, with Satou deeply hurt by her friend's inability to understand her. When Shouko eventually finds Satou and Shio's apartment and takes a picture of the two them together, Satou simply cannot trust her anymore. Satou spends the ensuing conversation between them lying to herself about not feeling anything for her friend, preparing herself for what she's about to do. At the end, the only thing Shouko can offer her friend — having worked so hard — is tears, as Satou briefly apologizes to her before ending her life.

Mitsuboshi Taiyou:

Taiyou was one of Satou's coworkers during her short-lived stint at Princess Imperial. He later begins working at Cure A Cute. Previously being a fairly average, popular ikemen, Taiyou stops being able to live a normal life once he's assaulted by his manager at Princess Imperial. After this, he gains a traumatic inability to be around older women.

He feels deeply dirtied and defiled by what was done to him, and becomes obsessed with the idea of becoming 'clean' and 'pure' again; specifically, he becomes interested in the purity and innocence of a specific missing girl he sees on posters around the town. After actually meeting Shio and being comforted by her in the Monochrome Night arc, his obsession with her becomes infinitely worse. In this way, he functions as a foil to Satou, reflecting her worst traits back at her. His desire to see Shio, his (imagined) angel, and be purified by her innocence draws him further and further into the high-stakes game being played by Asahi and Satou.

It's hard to talk about him further without putting this in a spoiler tag, so I'll have to do so.

Spoiler, click to view

Much like Asahi, Taiyou's central flaw is his inability to see Shio as a human being; though he sees her as a pure, innocent angel that will forgive his sin instead of as something that will fix his family. Despite all evidence to the contrary, despite his obsession allowing Satou to blatantly manipulate and use him for her own goals, and despite the increasing cost of doing so, Taiyou continues to walk the path of desperately seeking Shio to the very end. This results in him being targeted by Asahi, used by both Satou and Asahi in various ways throughout the story, and eventually re-traumatized by Satou's aunt after he makes one bad move. After this, at his most desperate point, he finally sees Shio once again — and all she does is tell Taiyou that she's not pure, and never has been. He is utterly ruined by his attempt to use Shio to become clean once again, and is one of the few characters with absolutely nothing redeeming about his ending.

Satou's Aunt:

Nameless aside from her title. Perhaps appropriate would be "the root of all evil". She is a promiscuous sadomasochistic woman who was the orphaned Satou's primary caretaker up until she recently began living with Shio. She's described by multiple people in the manga as beautiful yet terrifying, with an uncharacteristically gentle voice that unsettles people. Satou lies about still living with her aunt to keep people from discovering her address, and therefore her secret.

Satou's aunt believes deeply in her own ideology of love; she believes it to be accepting the true selves ('the most precious parts of their hearts', as she says) of anyone she comes across. As Satou puts it, she'll accept violence, sex, anything and everything. She cares not if people are rough with her, use her, are gentle to her, want her to spoil them, or want to spoil her. Accordingly, her moral compass is more than a little cracked; she has no reservations about helping criminals or "satisfying the hunger for love" of children.

Satou holds a deep, personal hatred for her above anyone else; her lack of moral objection to pedophilia, her assertion that she attempted to "love Satou every way she knew", and

Spoiler, click to view

her later rape of Mitsuboshi

result in the (always unspoken, unseen, but present) implication that she may have sexually abused Satou sitting heavy in the air whenever the two of them see each other.

Either way, she's left an indelible mark on Satou — her teachings of the meaning of love caused Satou to seek love through sexual encounters with boys, and therefore delayed her discovery of the real thing (from Satou's perspective at least). Nowadays, despite Satou passionately rejecting everything her aunt stands for, she's more influenced by her aunt than she'd like to admit. Her undying ideological commitment to her ideals of love, her complete lack of inhibition towards criminal behavior, and her tendency to furiously judge others are all shared by her aunt.

Satou's aunt functions, in a way, as the principal representative of the 'filthy adults' the story's major characters often pin their troubles on or show resentment towards. She constantly lords what little status she's gained from her age and her past power over Satou whenever Satou condemns her; this most directly shown at a later point in the manga where Satou is forced to ask her for help, demanding that her aunt makes up for what she did to her. However, this is sprinkled all throughout their scenes together, with Satou's aunt often intentionally reminding her of traumatic moments or her status as a "powerless child" to get under her skin.

What caused Satou's aunt to be like this is unknown, and frankly irrelevant to the author. The story is first and foremost interested in the viewpoints of its underage characters and what has shaped them into the people they are now, not its adult characters. Two other characters (Kitaumekawa Daiichi, Satou's teacher, and the Princess Imperial manager that raped Taiyou) play rather similar roles of two-dimensional abusers as Satou's aunt does, but they're far less interesting minor characters that I'm not going to discuss here.

⋆｡°✩METAPHOR & SYMBOLISM✩°｡⋆

Normally this wouldn't require its own section, but HSL has a unique visual and spoken language to it that has to be covered for a proper overview of the series. I'll run down a list of major pieces to this language quickly here:

1. The Heart Jar: Something we see often throughout the story as a representation of the characters' emotional states is a jar full of candy. This is a visual that marries two metaphors that Satou and Shio separately learned as children: on Shio's end, that a person's heart is like a jar (it can be filled with many things when a person is happy, empty when they have nothing to live for but continue to believe in something, or shattered entirely), and on Satou's end that love is like candy (taught to her by her aunt, that love comes in many different 'flavors': sweet, bitter, sour, mild, and poisonous; and that she should swallow as much of it as possible before refilling her stock). A jar filled with candy, empty, or cracked is therefore used to metaphorically indicate a character's emotional state relatively often — for example, in cutaways when Satou is talking about her heart (often subtitled in furigana as Jar in the original Japanese) being fulfilled by Shio.

1. Bitter vs. Sweet: This is fairly straightforward, but is used unusually often by Satou, so it's worth mentioning. She'll often describe moments where she's overwhelmed by her love for Shio as "sweet, so sweet", and moments where she's overwhelmed with disgust, jealousy, or bitter memories as "unbearably bitter".

1. Flower Vines: These are often found decorating the edges of panels. Their buds being either closed or in full bloom reflect Satou's past emptiness and her current loving happiness respectively.

1. The Angel: Both Satou and Mitsuboshi regularly refer to Shio as an angelic being, having "saved her loveless heart" or "purified him" respectively. This is pretty obviously tied to her perceived purity and benevolence.

1. The Moon: Asahi refers to Shio as "his (and the Koube family's) moon"; a guiding light in the darkness. This metaphor is played around with by introducing a darker side to it: the idea of a lunatic as originally defined (someone driven mad by the moon's light).

⋆｡°✩ART & AESTHETICS✩°｡⋆

Much of this is down to personal taste, and I've already touched on it somewhat in the last section, but I adore the art of this manga to death. I have nothing to quibble about with it. It's heavily shoujo-inspired moe art with a somewhat ethereal feel; very light linework, high contrast between black and white elements, highly decorative pages, and skill in portraying both subtle and strong expressions. The mangaka, Tomiyaki Kagisora, is also extremely skilled in laying out pages. The whole manga is filled with creative uses of text and panel shapes that make it easier to follow characters' thoughts in a specific order. Additionally, when characters are in highly unstable emotional states or generally desperate, their linework will often become intentionally messy - this spans from everything to outlines becoming jagged and scratchy, pupils losing their perfect circular shape and becoming globs of scribbles, or entire characters being scratched out in black. The art manages to effectively communicate both sides of the emotional states of its characters in a super memorable way that gives the manga a deeply unique visual identity. Below are some example of everything I talked about, apologies for the wall of images:

⋆｡°✩THEMES✩°｡⋆

I think these should be fairly apparent after reading the rest of the review, but I feel I should codify them. Naturally this section will be FULL of spoilers, and tagging them all would be too difficult, so tread lightly. Skip if you'd rather stay ignorant.

1. The cycle of abuse, continuing and breaking it: Best exemplified in Satou, as she does both to an extent. Despite her insistence on being completely different from her aunt, she ruins multiple people's lives and leaves a trail of bodies in her wake. Yet, at the same time, she does legitimately rescue Shio off the streets from an abusive situation. She cares for and loves a child who's known nothing but pain and confinement, and in the end, chooses to set that child free. Her circumstances didn't really allow her to do so without hurting anyone, but she managed to save just one person from going down the path she had. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many of the other characters — Asahi unintentionally ruins his sister's chance at escaping the Koube family, Mitsuboshi really just fucks himself up really badly, and Shouko becomes a victim of the other characters' machinations.

1. On that same note, imperfect victimhood: None of the characters that have been hurt deal with it in a socially acceptable way, and Happy Sugar Life challenges you to feel compassion for and cheer for them regardless. Society often fetishizes this idea of the "perfect victim"; a vulnerable, safe, gentle-hearted person who takes no agency into their own hands (or at most, goes to therapy) and is just waiting to be rescued by a "respectable" person. Happy Sugar Life dispenses with these notions, and shows us a full cast of very difficult and grey victims who have taken matters into their own hands and decided to seize happiness at any cost. It reminds us that victims are people, too — strong people who have been through a lot that will forever mark them, and who need to find happiness and fulfillment somehow too.

1. The meaning of love: The entire story is full of ideological clashes on the question of what love is. Is it asexual, fairy-tale-esque total devotion to one person alone, the sweet taste of happiness? Is it working your hardest to support and care for your friend? Is it someone unconditionally trusting you enough to keep their vows and tell you the truth, no matter what? Is it feeling the salvation and purity of an angel enveloping you? Is it the blood ties of family, working to sustain each other through the unbearable? On the more disgusting side, is it accepting the deepest and ugliest desires of anyone who'll give you the time of day? Is it fulfilling your desire to see a resistant teenage girl open up her body for you? Is it making sure no one can say they don't love you? You, the reader, have to decide which interpretation you most agree with. And you'll likely come out of this manga agreeing with one of them at least.

1. The long-lasting effects of both trauma and love on a child: The characters of the story are deeply affected and molded by the cruelty that defined their worlds as children. It touches every single aspect of their worldviews, personalities, thought processes, and emotions. At the same time, having this fate prevented, being shown love, touches someone for the rest of their life. The love Satou gave Shio long outlives her; even if she dies, nothing will ever cause the effect of the kindness, love, and care she gave Shio to disappear. She showed a terrified child that there was kindness in the world, that people will love her for who she is, and that it's possible to find these things in her life. That, more than anything, is immortal.

1. Tragedy: I nodded to it in the character section, but every major character has a fatal flaw that ends up dooming them in one situation or another. They have, in some ways, been too stained by the world around them to ever fully be rid of those flaws; try and improve as they might. The question of the story was never whether everyone would be happy — more if they could create anything beyond what their circumstances would dictate.

⋆｡°✩SHOULD YOU READ THIS THING?✩°｡⋆

Happy Sugar Life is, in my opinion, an incredible manga with extremely poignant things to say. It has, in some ways, a rough introduction — the first volume or two are structured in a way that can turn people off — but it's rare that I'll meet someone who finished the whole experience and didn't admit it was a cut above so many other series that try similar things, even if they didn't connect with it personally.

In my experience, you have to be a pretty specific kind of person to literally love everything about HSL. I happen to be one of those people — someone with a bitter childhood, someone who values love deeply, someone who desires to make something better out of themselves than the person they seem 'made' to be, and wonders if it's even possible.

Yet, the requirement for simply liking or loving it is not so high. All you have to be is someone who wants to be challenged. Someone who wants to understand more about themselves, or about people around them who have had less fortunate lives than them. Someone who wonders what love is. Someone who wants to be soothed by seeing people who were hurt and left for dead strive towards something better, messy as it may be. If any of these labels fit you, I'm almost certain you'll love this manga. Even if you're simply someone who loves beautiful art, or an entertaining story, or bold characters, you'll probably find something you like.

If you're still reading this review and uncertain about whether or not to read Happy Sugar Life, I would implore you to at least check it out. It improves linearly, so if you enjoy the beginning, you will probably love the end; and if you feel apathetic about the beginning, you may still like it by the end. It is a manga that will undoubtedly make you think, make you feel, and make you question. It's a manga that has entranced me for years on end now with its central idea, an idea that is probably best summed up by the musings on the back cover of the final volume:

人が全てを切り捨てて、最期に残るのは、愛だけ。 When you strip it all away, the only thing left of a person is love.

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REALLY STUPID PERSONAL RAMBLINGS (DO NOT READ IF YOU LIKE COHERENT THOUGHT) EDIT: I've thought a bit more about this story as I always do, and I think I'm finally able to articulate what makes me connect so much to this series. This is fully self-indulgomatic here, so don't pay this too much mind compared to the more structured and official review above. But I think it's just... I'm a very cynical person. I too have been hurt and abandoned at every turn by the people who were supposed to take care of me. I see so much evil in the world around me, and plenty in myself - "I'm bad, but everyone else is worse" is how I would often describe it. But I'm just... tired of sitting around and letting it happen. I did for so long, and it got me nowhere. The ability to pity yourself is comforting for maybe a few years at max before it just becomes stupid.

I'm a warped, underdeveloped person who sees little hope in the future and is very immoral in a lot of ways. But so is Satou. And she tried to make something good out of her life for once - she tried so, so fucking hard. And she died for it. An uncaring world crushed her beneath its heels, never even trying to understand her or why she was the way she was, for the crime of fucking up really badly when trying to find her own way in making something better than she was given the opportunity to be.

But her efforts weren't in vain. She hurt so many people, ruined lives that would have otherwise been fine, honestly probably caused more harm than good from a utilitarian perspective. But she saved one person - Shio. She rescued Shio from a life of bitter pain and showed her that she could be loved, that love exists in the world, that the rare person will legitimately risk everything to just to help one other person. Maybe she didn't have a chance to begin with, and her body breaking against the cold pavement was the only ending she could have ever had. But, to take a page out of Franz Liszt's book, she turned the long, bitter suicide of her life into a sacrifice by faith. And that will stay with me for a long time yet.