Three Days of Happiness

I think this manga helped reignite my flame for dramatic manga, in general. Probably because of the self-insertion that I went through when reading this. To live a worthless life, doing nothing worth praise, just wasting countless days without any perspective of things getting better. That's what life for many people of my generation is about, particularly the ones who are so interested in manga, anime and video games.

So naturally the protagonist is right on my alley, as he represents a common archetype of young men that's been on the rise as of the last 20 years or so. And I really like that, just for the pure reason of representation, of seeing someone that actually had similar circumstances as me.

Let me elaborate on that further: I was (or still am? I don't think people change opinions that quickly, but I digress) one of those guys who thought representation on media was something unnecessary. While I still think that some ways of achieving this said representation are worse than others, now I finally realize what people meant about the subject. And it made me glad to do so, as it connected me to art in a whole new way.

The main answer the authors give us to the existential dread endured by the protagonist is not an uncommon one. In fact, it's quite overused in stories in general. Of course I'm talking about love, this mystic thing that seems to give meaning to our daily lives. Or at least that's what they say on TV.

Although it is quite cliché, I don't think that's a bad thing at all. In fact, this manga manages to reaffirm the indispensability of love to a healthy life. Throughout all the chapters, we see a protagonist that is constantly unaware of his own necessity for giving and receiving love. Distancing himself from other kids on school days, giving up his dreams, but also longing for a special someone to attribute meaning to his existence (as they have done during all his adolescence) is almost ironic, as if the answer was dangling in front of him all the time, but he lacked the lenses to even notice it.

That's where the love interest comes, where she personifies these lenses and helps the protagonist see what really mattered. Even after selling most of his life time, he's not regreftul or anything like that. I think this is also a point that the series pushes forward with great success, that is, to precisely depict the contrast between quantity and quality, as basic as this may seem.

In the beginning of the manga, we see that the main character owns lots of books and discs, which he spends his days endlessly consuming. Then, he sells everything and stacks a big amount of money, which he tries to spend accordingly. And, at the end, we see the last gamble of his in the form of actually selling the whole remainder of life he still had. The point being, particularly on such times as those at which we live on, with a constant influx of information and overall availability of entertainment, of this insatiable thirst for more and more. The series foreshadows the dire consequences of this line of thought on a "what-if" future of the protagonist, where he is mournful and lonely thanks to his wasted time.

Overall, it was a great read. Maybe one of the shortest manga I've ever read? Not that I've read a bunch of them, to be honest. What will stay within me after reading this is an important message that no only applies to me but, as I said before, to a whole generation of people my age. To stop longing for more and more, to stop clinging too much to the past or future, to actually meet people, in real life. We need stories like this one nowadays. We need to learn how to live again.