I feel obliged to write a review about "I sold my life for 10,000 yen a year" or "3 Days of Happiness" (which I shall from here on out refer to as 10K) primarily because of some bizarre remarks lobbied at it on a certain site that shall not be named. The remarks in question regard 10K as generally "not good" for a variety of reasons like:
And so on. Now any astute reader would be quick to note that certain remarks on that list are a bit strange. At least prima facie. We'll take a closer look at these criticisms in detail below to determine if they hold any weight. I'll let the reader decide if they're convinced.
A bit of caution is advised. I assume that the reader has already read the title under review as there will be plenty of spoilers. I'll structure the review in two parts. Part 1 will be my remarks on the manga and part 2 will be addressing the remarks made in the list above. I'll end this review with a short conclusion summing up my both Part 1 and Part 2.
A word of warning: this review is rather long.
Now on to the review.
10K follows a young twenty-something year old by the name of Kusunoki. He's a lonely college student working part-time jobs but no matter how much he works, he can't make ends meet. To make matters worse, he's bad at those jobs and the only reprise he has from his lonely life are the music and books he listens to and reads.
That aside, one day Kusunoki is told of a store that buys lifespans by an old man who he sells his books to (for a very small amount). Incredulous, Kusunoki leaves but not without the address of the place the old man spoke about. He makes a stop at another place, this time to sell off his CDs (for another very small amount) where he is told the same thing and off we go.
We can surmise Kusunoki's decision from this. With little money, many needs, and a lack of a way of fulfilling them, he decides to take the plunge and sell his lifespan. But what does it mean to sell your "lifespan?"
Within the story, to sell one's lifespan is to sell a portion X of your predicted N-Y lifespan, where N is the predicted amount of years you will live and Y is your current age. So suppose you are predicted to live 60 years and you are currently 20 years old and you decide to sell off 30 years of your predicted life. You will have a remainder of 10 years to live (60-20=40 and 40-30=10). In the case of N=Y, we have it that the remainder of time left alive for the seller is at least 3 days. Thus if you sell all 40 years in our previous example, you will have at least 3 days left to live. You can also sell in terms of months and days for those wondering.
The story does not go into how the person dies nor what the business gets out of buying lifespan from people nor some of the other related lifespan-valuation ideas present in 10K but not because the writer drops or forgot about it but because the writer has a different goal in mind. These answers are not given because they are irrelevant to the purpose the author is attempting too present. I will return to what their purpose is later but suffice it for now, realizing it addresses most, if not all, the complaints raised against 10K.
Well then, supposing you sell X amount of years for money, how much would you get? Well that depends. Let Z be the amount of yen you'll receive after selling X amount of years and let f be the method that determines Z given X and the seller themselves. Within the story, f is described as being comprised as giving weight to overall happiness, how happy you make others, how much you contribute to society, etc. The idea is that the method that determines the monetary value of a person's life is fluid to an extent.
Kusunoki takes the offer and gets a valuation of 10,000 yen per year, selling all but the last three months of his expected 30 years of his life. Thus he is offered a 300,000 yen in total. At first when receiving his valuation, Kusunoki is upset since he expected a greater valuation. We have a flashback that recounts a morality tale of a person's value as a child and his desired valuation of his life: 3 million yen.
It's good to note the irony present here. Kusunoki, at the time he sells the rest of his life, believes his life is meaningless (i.e. valueless). It is ironic that he should desire a high valuation if this is what he presumes and given the methodology applied by the shop, it only reinforces the theme of the story. He desires salvation but fails to realize in desiring salvation from someone else (the shady shop), he gives up the autonomy to live his life. This here is the overarching theme of the manga.
In asked "How much is a person's life worth in monetary value?" you are being misled for it is hard to pin down a universal way of mapping monetary value to an individual person's life. That's not to say the value of a person's life is a meaningless or it's a nonsensical question or that a person's value is somehow "above" monetary value, for if asked hard enough you can devise a method of doing so, but that whatever method you choose would be inconsistent. For supposing that such a mapping could occur you'd have to pin down what you mean by a person's life. Is life time? Then you aren't valuing life but time. Is life then status? Still not life. How about possibility? Not life either.
You simply cannot place a value on the chance to live one's life. That there is a simple yet intuitive way of understanding what we mean when we say "living our lives." Life, in our common day to day usage, refers to the way we understand what it means to live from moment to moment. As we cannot completely predict the future, there is an element of chance at play and as long as we cannot measure the probability of that chance being positive or negative, we cannot assign a monetary value to a person's life.
At this point you might be rolling your eyes at such a tried and tired theme but I assure this theme is not the major one. This is but a secondary theme that comes with the premise. The primary theme of the manga is something more banal. It is the acceptance of yourself. More precisely:
When I claim "I want this" I simultaneously say "I think this is valuable." The problem with desire though its often left to the passions. In order to properly say "This is valuable" I must also be aware of my passions so I don't make the mistake of valuing something worthless. But in order to be aware of your passions you must be accepting of what passions there lie. Suppose you deny having a passion because you think its negative. Denying it doesn't make it disappear. Acknowledging it is the first part. Working towards excising it is the next. Sometimes we have passions we cannot excise. In those cases we must come to terms with them.
In life we're often led astray by things that appear valuable and develop tunnel vision towards them. We disregard all other elements of life in pursuit of such things. Sometimes these things really are valuable but in the history of man it is often the case of the opposite. We're lead to chase things that have no value at all or if they did have value, it was much less than what we believed. We pursue gold but end up with fool's gold instead. This is the case of Kusunoki.
Once one sells a portion of their lifespan, one gets a person that observes them if the seller has only 1 year or less left to live. This is the state Kusunoki is in and his observer is a young twenty-something year old woman by the name of Miyagi. Thus begins the tale of Kusunoki's last few months alive.
I won't recall much of the plot from here on out as the actual how things transpire is of little importance to my review. I am more interested in the why. Suffice it to say, the manga tracks Kusunoki as he comes to terms with the actuality of his life. Kusunoki, as we're presented, is a paradoxical man. He claims one thing but does another.
There is one rather controversial character that reinforce this theme and two other one-off characters that serves to highlight Kusunoki's character. The first is his childhood friend Himeno whom he makes a childhood promise to marry if they can't find other people that love them and the latter are Kusunoki's high school friend Naruse and a college girl by the name of Wakana.
In the case of Wakana, we're introduced to her as being interested in Kusunoki. They go on dates, they hang out, they have similar interests but Kusunoki acts cold to her; he doesn't pursue her for the simple reason that he wants to value his promise with Himeno. In doing so, Kusunoki's character is made apparent. He is a man who cannot let go of the past and thus misinterprets it. The promise was only if they couldn't find anyone they would be together. Wakana was certainly someone who was interested in Kusunoki but in holding to the past and twisting it, he hurts himself. Hurts Wakana. Thus when he tries to contact her, he finds his message not reaching her. We're made aware that Kusunoki is searching for a salvation of sorts. An acceptance of sorts. His first attempt fails.
In the case of Naruse, we have it that Kusunoki wants to posture in front of him (we're told Naruse is the opposite of Kusunoki); he wants him to misinterpret Miyagi and Kusunoki's relationship but this fails as he is reminded that Miyagi cannot be seen by anyone other than him and other observers. As the meeting continues, Kusunoki realizes that he cannot get what he wants from him: approval. Thus ends the meeting as Kusunoki runs off to mull over what happens. His second attempt ends in a failure.
The Himeno arc was perhaps the most polarizing from what I read online. This stems from Himeno's character herself. She's presented as Kusunoki's childhood friend and hinted that there was a love-hate (possible love interest) relationship going on there. By the time we're reintroduced to her again she is different to how we were presented her. This difference in presentation is what I take to be the central contention. To be clear, by "difference in presentation," I mean that her actions in her arc appear nonsensical in contrast to certain moments in flashbacks prior to her arc.
It bears noting though that the criticisms lobbied at this part of the story fail or ended up being weaker than they claim. For one, let us recount how Himeno was introduced. Himeno is introduced as a foil to Kusunoki. They're both smart as children, both outsiders, both "forgotten on the shelf." They have a love-hate relationship. They only hang around one another because the other children didn't like either of them. The reason other children didn't like them was because they were more or less rude to others. It is worth to note that all of this is recounted through Kusunoki's perspective and as we have said before, Kusunoki's perspective is colored. What is colored you ask? Well Himeno's real feelings towards Kusunoki as we shall see.
(It's also interesting to note in Ch. 2 that the flashback of Himeno and Kusunoki is interrupted by the arrival of Miyagi who is another foil to Kusunoki and ergo to Himeno. In contrast to Kusunoki, Miyagi isn't one to shy away from the truth. Several moments (recall the attempted assault scene) paint her as a cold woman but we later learn that she is all too kind and her cold front is but how she's adapted to the harshness of her life.)
Kusunoki attempts to contact Himeno in a last ditch effort of finding some meaning/salvation in his life. What ensues is a harsh encounter that directly contradicts the image of Himeno in his and the readers mind. We find that Himeno is a single mother and a high school dropout. Furthermore we find that Himeno had attempted to contact Kusunoki once in a letter Kusunoki claims "wasn't like her." In a small attempt to reorient his life, Kusunoki gets a haircut, buys new clothes, all in preparation for meeting Himeno.
When they have dinner, he unveils everything about selling his lifespan and how he feels about her and in general. She smiles, says she believes him and leaves. He gets a letter from one of the waiters and in it we see what Himeno's true feelings are: She had always hated Kusunoki. Here is where most readers are confused. why did she hate him? Merely because he never responded to her cries for help as she claimed? That is what pushed her to plan to
Consider changing their sexes. Make Himeno a male now and Kusunoki a female with the events mutatis mutandis. To the astute reader we see that this situation is a common occurrence among young males. There is a girl who the guy is interested in, she ghosts him, and out of the blue she appears before him claiming he was everything to her. In anger and frustration, the guy would try to take it out on the girl in some fashion by perhaps calling her a bitch or something along those lines, maybe even physically hurting her demanding where she was when he needed her. My question is this: If the above situation holds then how does Himeno and Kusunoki's not? Surely if the above holds then so does Himeno and Kusunoki's.
But perhaps a critic may claim that Himeno's letter to Kusunoki does not meet the requirements to be consider a "cry for help" and therefore Kusunoki is not in the wrong and Himeno is a poorly written character. Here I agree that to demand Kusunoki to realize that this was a "cry for help" from that letter is too much but this doesn't make Himeno, what some claim, a "poorly written character." The only claim that is true of this criticism is that the letter was not a cry for help. If you need help it is often best to be forthright but as many of us know it isn't that easy. Therefore I don't hold it against the author for this. It appears his goal in this arc was to point out how often we misinterpret people when they need help. He's making a statement of being conscientious of others and this I don't find contentious. Thus Kusunoki's third and final attempt at salvation ends in a transformative failure.
Moving along, the second half of 10K focuses more on Kusunoki and Miyagi's relationship. Kusunoki by this time has realized the reality of the situation: there is no one in his life that will provide salvation. Kusunoki then takes it to himself to enjoy whatever last days he has by making Miyagi enjoy them. They go around taking photos of vending machines, eating, and talking in front of other people fully knowing that no one but Kusunoki can see Miyagi. Kusunoki's character is then cemented as one of a weirdo but at this point in the story he's okay with that. He has no one that will remember him. Better to be remembered as a weirdo then never at all.
As we proceed through the second half we see that the view other people have of Kusunoki changes. They become more accepting of him and Miyagi, even though they don't see her. They come to realize he is a nice man despite being strange. A point of contention from some critics online is that the manga manages to put all the terrible people in the beginning and all the good people in the latter half. I applaud this critic because they realize the story is structured but they fail to realize that in structuring the story this way, the author intends to cement the theme(s) of the work.
As a corollary to the THEME (and therefore a proper theme itself) presented before we have it that:
This is what the second half of 10K wishes and succeeds in doing so. We have it that Kusunoki has changed since his introduction. He has no more hopes in salvation handed from other people. Now he lives acknowledging who he is and who he was and how he will be. In fact the majority of the second half is Kusunoki acting in such a way to make Miyagi's life a little happier. We see that it works. Miyagi's wish, her modest desire, is to have someone else acknowledge her existence, to give her a bit of kindness and love.
Here is a girl who at the age of 10 was forced to live a life not fit for a child. Spirited away from friends, family, and a normal life she is forced to follow people who have little to no interest in her. And there is Kusunoki, who realized that all that glitters is not gold and now wishes to make Miyagi's life a little happier as she has done for him. It is worth noting at this point, Miyagi has fallen for Kusunoki.
We learn that the true value of his assessment in this half is incredibly low and that Miyagi, in hoping to save him the sadness that would follow from realizing the value assigned to him, gives him a portion of her own hard earned cash from working as an observer. Kusunoki apologies and off we go in him trying to make her life a little better. This is where we reach the climax of the story.
Kusunoki was presented as an artist early on but stops being burnt out on it. In a flit of passion and inspiration he takes it all back and his subsequent valuation puts him at enough money to pay off most of Miyagi's debt. Now with 3 days left to live he finds living alone all too painful. Kusunoki has changed. What was once a little palpable because of his delusions becomes utterly destructive without. Lucky for him, Miyagi loves him far too much and she does the same thing. She sells all her life but the last 3 days to spend them with him.
I can't help but smile at this ending that reaffirms something so universal. Loneliness kills. We can only bear it when we have a crutch but a crutch is not a person. It could not hold us, reaffirm us, love us, cry for us, nor miss us. Only a person can do that.
The epilogue only further cements the themes discussed here. A similar situation is presented but this time it is a con man and his daughter. He is offered the same information that Kusunoki is given but declines ever doing it. Ironic enough it is a con man that knows the true value of of things. We see he is confident in who he is and what he is doing and where he is going. He is a responsible adult in the true sense of the word and in contrast to Kusunoki, he needs not resort to others nor delusions to know what to do and where to go.
10K is a wonderful little manga full of melancholic and hard truths. What makes the themes hard truths is not that they're hard to swallow as stated above but they're hard to swallow as presented. Why? Perhaps the reader may find himself in such a similar situation, believing salvation is just another person away. In response, I'm reminded of a quote by Carl Jung:
Thus we have the themes of 10K explicated by Jung himself.
Now I have been piling praise upon praise unto 10K but is their anything truly negative that a critic can say about 10k? Yes. I think the weakest part of the manga is the last chapter. Specifically the reaction the town folks had towards Kusunoki's reaction towards missing Miyagi and Miyagi's subsequent appearance. They were all too accepting of her actual existence that they don't even question why they never saw her or whatnot. I found it a bit strange, cheesy, cheap and all too Hollywood-like for my preferences but it's a minor inconvenience that detracts I think little from the overall story.
As I end this review, a certain proverb comes to mind: Longest way round is shortest way home.
Indeed, it took all of Kusunoki's life to realize that a valuable life doesn't start with others but with yourself.
So by now you should be aware that I really enjoyed this manga. To sum up once more, I thought it was interesting, melancholic, and overall a really sweet little romance. In fact it's because a curmudgeon like me found it so enjoyable that I balked at the remarks I read. At first I thought perhaps it was just a matter of preference (and that might be the case if they dislike it full stop) but regardless of that I only have their remarks to work with and thus must take it to figuring out if these remarks hold water. Going over the manga once again and upon analyzing their criticisms further cements the point that it probably was a matter of preference because certainly none of the remarks in the list above hold any water and leads me to believe either:
(1) notwithstanding, (2) seems to be a likelier case for the list of remarks above given what I've said of the manga in Part 1.
A word of warning for those venturing this far into the review. This section might seem needlessly pedantic or critical but I feel it is necessary to explicate why certain criticisms are examples of bad criticisms.
Let's give a shot then.
Some of the remarks I think are good to focus on first are the ones that focus on the premise of the manga like (a) having a ridiculous premise and (b) having an arbitrary plot driver.
Now (a) makes the claim that the premise of 10K is ludicrous. Maybe stupid. I'm not sure but let's assume he's making the weaker claim that the premise of 10K is laughably bad.
Now lots of things are laughably bad but in what way is 10K's premise "laughably bad?" Is it just the idea of selling one's remaining lifespan for a variable amount of Yen that's bad? Or is it that the manga uses the idea to craft a character study that's bad? I'm not quite sure about it but I think (and take this with a grain of salt) that perhaps its the very idea that irks this critic. If so then (a) can be stated then as follows:
Now (a') makes three claims: one, that the idea of selling one's remaining lifespan is bad, two, that the premise is bad, and three, 10K is bad. Now you might be inclined to think that the three claims are in fact just two but you'd be mistaken. Let's recall that 10K is about a lonely college student that is struggling to survive when he comes across a business that offers to get him out of his troubles by offering him money in exchange for a portion of his life. Now the idea is present in the premise but the idea is not the premise itself and vice-versa. Thus it seems bizarre to make the claim (a') makes because it makes sense to say that one can dislike the premise but like the idea.
To make the idea more clearer, what the critic in the original criticism (a) is saying (rather implicitly) in general is:
But that's clearly false, for the critic in (a) is making the claim from right to left but as I've shown the claim from left to right does not hold thus (a') is logically invalid and must be reformulated as:
The astute reader will know that even this reformulation cannot save the criticism. In fact, explicating the claim further below reveals the flawed logic behind it.
Explicated as above we clearly see that the critics' argument does not hold. For even supposing the idea present in 10K is bad, why should we assume as true 1 and 3? I think the the idea that grown men and women in spandex fighting is a bad idea but I liked the Avengers. Or similarly, I think the premise of a purple man killing half the universe is bad because of his reasoning on Malthusian economics but I thought Infinity War was quite good. Etc.
We see that the conclusion the critic wants doesn't come to them easily by this criticism and the reason I took such a critical (and pedantic) view toward such an inane criticism is because I think critics who peddle similar views operate under a flawed understanding of what fiction is.
I've said this in my Instant Bullet review but fiction is a bit like persuasive writing. Critics like the one in (a) make a category mistake that conflate fiction with a logical system of rules and axioms. If the post-modernists got something right (sorry Peterson but even a broken clock can be right twice a day) is that this view is false.
(b)'s claim is hard to parse out because it appears to say something but in fact it really doesn't say anything. It supposes that, in contrast to "arbitrary plot drivers," there are "non-arbitrary plot drivers" to which further makes me scratch my head. Does the critic mean plot device? But a plot device is not a plot driver in general (e.g. red herrings, Chekhov's Gun) so we can't assume that "plot driver" means "plot device."
(Note that I use no quotes for plot driver in the above paragraph. In doing so I wish to make a distinction between plot driver in the sense that it is a plot device that drives/moves the plot forward and "plot driver" in the sense the critic uses. I do not say that only my usage of the term is proper but rather the usage of the term "plot driver" in the above claim is nonsensical as I show below.)
Then what is a "plot driver?" I assume its some device (in the widest sense possible) that acts in such a way that the plot moves from A to B. Prima facie this seems to be the way it's used but on closer inspection we see that its definition is far too inclusive because then I can make the claim that a writer is a "plot driver." Taking the writer to be a device (in the widest sense possible), the writer does act (read: write) in such a way that the plot moves from A to B.
Certainly I don't think that's what this criticism takes into consideration of what a "plot driver" is so our definition must be wrong and thus we must exclude non-fictional objects from our definition. There is still a problem present here. Supposing we merely consider all devices in "plot driver's" definition to be fictional, a "plot driver" must be a proper subset of plot devices. If so then the adjective "arbitrary" serves no purpose for all fiction is arbitrary. [1]
[1] (I mean arbitrary in the same sense the critic means arbitrary, that is contrived. All fiction is contrived but the point of contention here is not one whether or not fiction is essentially contrived but whether or not something is contrived in the commendatory sense; i.e. whether the piece of fiction is written well or not. This is the sense the critic means when he uses "arbitrary.")
But suppose you say:
Fair enough. Suppose the critic meant "unrealistic situation" in the sense above when they claimed 10K has an "arbitrary plot driver." Under this interpretation then, their original criticism becomes:
Their claim (b') is thus reliant on there actually being unrealistic situations in 10K which is a reformulation of another more general claim that their suspension of disbelief has been shattered. This is quite a contentious claim as we must surmise what the critic means by "unrealistic situations." On one interpretation, it could mean anything fantastical but that doesn't seem to be the case given they took time to read 10K. Thus it must mean that the premise wasn't what threw them off but rather something else within the story.
Supposing the critic suspends his disbelief in regards to the premise then they also must suspend their disbelief in regards to elements that stem from the premise like the existence of observers, Miyagi's character and subsequent actions, etc. [2] And if they do not agree with accepting the elements stemming from the premise then either fiction is not for them or the burden of proof lies with them to provide a more incisive criticism than something like "arbitrary plot drivers." Now supposing the critic suspends his disbelief in regard to those elements as well what are we left with as an "unrealistic situation?"
[2] (You might ask why should the critic accept Miyagi's character and subsequent actions if they accept the premise and to that I respond with, re-read Part 1 and you'll see that her character and actions are a result of her character's background. A background that is built off the premise.)
Perhaps the critic meant how certain characters were written (consider the childhood friend and Naruse along with the town's citizens). If that is the case then their criticism is a recapitulation of (d) and we address that criticism there. Suppose though the critic didn't mean how certain characters were written but something else then we're at a loss. If it's not the premise, the elements stemming from the premise, nor the characters then what are we to surmise about what the critic means by "unrealistic situations?" The criticism fails to say anything.
Let's move on to something a little less pedantic. I'll take the claims (c) dropped plot lines before considering the more thematic criticisms of 10K like (d) characters acting weirdly/stupidly, (e) mishandled themes, (f) overused themes told in a non-engaging way, and (g)
Now (c) is what I have in mind when I say that these critics have simply misread or misunderstood plot points in 10K because when asked for them, some of these critics point to the childhood friend of Kusunoki as the prime example of a dropped plot line. Another I saw referenced the love interest for Kusunoki during his college years. If this is their only examples then my claim here is that these critics have simply misread or misunderstood plot points in 10K. The criticism lobbied against 10K that Kusunoki's childhood friend and the college love interest are a dropped plot lines weighs in my favor because they were not dropped plot lines.
Re-read Part 1 of this review to understand Kusunoki's and his childhood friend's character. You'll see that her decision to disappear is right in line with the thematic elements of the manga. I discuss those thematic elements as well in Part 1 as well. Re-read it again to see just how snugly her and Kusunoki's actions fit in with the themes and the purpose of Wakana's character.
Now the general more thematically aimed criticisms.
I will not say much about (d) here as I believe I explicated much of character's behavior in Part 1. Thus I point the critic with this claim to Part 1 of this review.
(e) claims that it mishandled its themes but to mishandle its themes is to fail to present them in a convincing manner. For that claim to be true, 10K had to fail at achieving in explicating its goal but as I outlined in Part 1 that isn't the case. 10K takes a character approach to the story, keeping big ideas as springboards into a more interesting character study of a man with delusions of himself and the world. If for the critic, the theme was something related to the value of life then they missed the actual point the author was trying to get across and noted only what are accidental or secondary features of the story.
If my interpretation of the theme(s) of the manga and my subsequent analysis of it hold then (f)'s criticism lacks any bite. For, if I am correct then 10K has certainly presented their themes in an engaging way. Note I will not argue against the claim that the themes are are overused because it is irrelevant whether a theme is new or not as it does not correlate with how well the themes are told. It may be the case that this part of the claim is right but the other part, the one claiming that the themes were told in a non-engaging way, is certainly wrong.
There were some views online that claimed
I suppose nuance is lost on some people. Yes, they will die but it is not their primary goal. Their primary goal was to stay with each other for the remaining time they had (hence the title "3 Days of Happiness"). Or what? Are parents who sacrifice their lives (in the literal sense; like say they were in a fatal car collision) for their children's lives suicidal? Of course not. We wouldn't say of them "Oh so and so committed suicide by saving their children's lives in that fatal car collision." That's ridiculous. Likewise, we can't say the same thing in this case either.
In the case where a critic cannot still understand the nuance, perhaps it would be better to discuss the necessary and sufficient conditions for an act to be considered suicide. For some act A to be considered a suicide A must be an action such that it leads to death. This is a necessary condition but this is not sufficient for some act A to be considered suicide for we must take into account the intention of a person as well. Thus:
In the case of
I hope I have convinced negative reviewers that some of the criticisms lobbied against 10K do not hold water. Rather they seem indicative that they did not find it to their liking for whatever reasons. Regardless, better criticisms might explicate actual flaws of the work but they are not present in the ones discussed above. For those readers that have read the work and this review, I hope I helped explicate the themes of the manga and contributed to a more detailed understanding of the narrative. 10K is a wonderful little work that deserves all the praise it gets. I urge everyone to read it.
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