Buenas noches, Punpun, vol. 7

おやすみプンプン [Oyasumi Punpun] #7

by Inio Asano, Marc Bernabé (translator)

Punpun, ahora independizado, se aleja cada día más de sus semejantes. Finge llevar una vida despreocupada, pero el vacío es cada vez más enorme… hasta que, por casualidad, vuelve a ver a Aiko.

Genres: Manga, Seinen, Comics, Fiction, Graphic Novels, Slice Of Life, Drama

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2010

About the author

Inio Asano (浅野いにお, Asano Inio) is a Japanese cartoonist. He is known for his character-driven stories and his detailed art-style, making him one of the most influential manga author of his generation.
Asano was born in 1980 and produced his first amateur comics as a teenager. His professional debut happened in 2000 in the pages of the magazine Big Comic Spirits. Since then, he has collaborated with most of the major Japanese magazines of seinen manga (comics for a mature audience). Among Asano's internationally acclaimed works are: the psychological horror Nijigahara Holograph (2003-2005); the drama Solanin (2005-2006); the existentialistic slice-of-life Goodnight Punpun (2007-2013); the erotic A Girl on the Shore (2009-2013); the sci-fi Dead Dead Demon's Dededede Destruction (2014-2022).

Reviews

[Shi2chi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compared to the previous volumes this one was more funny
The story didn't progress that much but there were some events that might have been the ground work for pushing the story forward in the future volumes
Punpun's character got more mature

[Aitor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ahondamos más en la depresión de Punpun. Asano, esta vez, le dedica el tomo completo a él. La verdad, no tengo mucho que comentar al respecto. Explora la psique destrozada de su protagonista sin caer en tópicos y presenta escenas brutalmente realistas, desde aquella búsqueda desesperada de esa sombra que es Aiko en su vida hasta su triste vida en un piso nuevo donde escucha a sus vecinos noche tras noche. Asano hace daño a Punpun en cada nuevo capítulo y no podría estar más contento: sin sacar de contexto esa frase, quiero decir que el autor no se evade de los peligros de la vida moderna. Más bien los trata en profundidad, demostrando de qué maneras puede llegar una persona normal y corriente a un estado anímico irreparable.

La conversación con Yûichi y el padre son verdaderamente interesantes no solo por la relación entre personajes, sino también por las lecciones de vida en que se convierten a las pocas páginas. Como siempre con Asano, el padre es un personaje trágico que no se queda en lo negativo y adquiere ligeros matices positivos. Adoro que suceda lo mismo con Midori, ahora realmente preocupada por el futuro y el bienestar de Punpun a pesar de una mala acción que cometió en su pasado, en un momento de desesperación total.

El estudio de personaje que el autor realiza con Punpun es impresionante. Ese panel deshumanizador del pobre pollito deformado, su adquisición de una nueva forma plana, triangular, que se deja llevar por la corriente vital; la ya referenciada escena del apartamento o todas las conversaciones con su compañero de clase e incluso su alucinación con Aiko son momentos e ideas brutales en ambos sentidos de la palabra. Hay aquí y allá algo extraño, como el capítulo metido con calzador de la secta, pero todo fluye perfectamente y se introduce de manera muy personal en esa mente en constante decadencia. El final del tomo, con la reaparición de Sachi, abre una trama que me tiene realmente interesado para con el futuro de la serie. Recuerdo relativamente qué viene a partir de ahora y, la verdad, no estoy preparado.

[Dragana]

0 od mene za ovaj deo

[Aida · Rating 5 out of 5]

End. 1401/4/26
ولی با اینحال هنوزم یک نکته ی مثبت راجع به کار پاره وقتش وجود داشت . در واقع، اون الان حس نسبت بهتری از قبل داست. پون پون با خودش گفت " شاید از فردا بیشتر تلاش بکنم."
ولی هیچکس خبر نداشت که اون دیروز هم همینُ به خودش گفته بود ، و همچنین روز قبلش و روز قبلترش و ...

💔🙂

[yengyeng · Rating 5 out of 5]

At some point, Pun Pun morphed from his 2D cartoon bird form to a pyramid form to show that he grew up, lost confidence, became a cynic and fell into deeper depression. He found love but his pencil drawn still life portrait told him that he did not deserve to be happy like a normal human being. The hyper-realistic drawings of the city are fantastic and it's always fun to play "Where's Pun Pun?"

[Joni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Todas las loas de comentarios anteriores aplican para este tomo, tanto por los dibujos como por lo complejo de cada personaje, la profundidad, las miserias, miedos y frustraciones que acarrean.
Sumado a esto, Asano tira unas magias que no se pueden creer.
Narración secuencial muda, que aparte de contar qué pasa, son de una belleza poética increíbles.

[Radwa · Rating 4 out of 5]

watching punpun grow up is depressing.

but it really always comes back to aiko, doesn't it? I wonder what roles will she play in the future?

[Jon Ureña · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a series called "Goodnight Punpun" in English. I'm just reviewing this volume. Four and a half stars.

The story at its psychologically bleakest. It starts with the protagonist's mother being called by a doctor during or after (I can't remember) her stint there for a pneumothorax. Turns out she has an aggresive cancer. We cut to two years later, when the protagonist is about to graduate from high school, and his mother is on her deathbed. She apologizes, tells him she loved him, etc. She dies. He doesn't manage to care. When he gets to his uncle's during that tumultuous period when someone in your family dies, he learns that the letters he got regularly from his stranged father, letters full of stories about aliens and space adventures he used to tell him when he was a child, actually came from his mother. The protagonist still doesn't care.

I usually dislike when a story features someone dying from cancer, unless that's a significant part of the point of the main plot (as in "I Want to Eat Your Pancreas" by Yoru Sumino). Although it happens in real life, it always feels too random. In this case I didn't care for the mother character and I'm kind of glad she's gone. Poor woman.

The protagonist's father decides to make an appearance. He's become a drunkard on the verge of Alzheimer's. Both the protagonist's uncle and his now wife Midori are uncomfortable and ashamed of the father's stupid antics, and of him addressing the protagonist, who is now a 18 year old, as if he were still a child. It's even worse for the protagonist, because he's changed enough to consider his father now a pathetic, stupid nobody even though he felt some kinship with him as a child. The father lives in the countryside of Fukushima of all places (this was written two years before the area was devastated in real life), and he asks his son to come live with him. We get shots of Midori, who as you might remember had fucked the protagonist when he was sixteen, looking worried that he might agree and therefore she might lose that attachment, but the protagonist states that he wants to live alone. The father makes some more idiotic comments and leaves. We get a final shot of him walking away with tears in his eyes.

The protagonist feels a profound anguish and kneels against the door, under the caring look of Midori. His uncle decides to take his nephew for a walk. After the uncle found the courage to come back to Midori and propose to her, he has become a cool, collected guy. He tries to level with his nephew. His wife had come clear and told him that she had seduced the protagonist, but instead of being angry, the uncle feels closer to him. They see the world through clear eyes, they understand the cosmic joke and the hopelessness of it all. He wishes for him to face the world head on, and try to keep his center as he traverses a reality that won't accommodate him. His uncle doesn't have any fantasy that his current life will hold up; Midori will wise up and leave him in the end, because he's a rotten piece of garbage, but he's daring to face the world one day at a time without hiding anymore.

The protagonist has graduated and doesn't seem to want to go to college. He starts working part time at uninteresting jobs (like counting the amount of people that pass through an area). Meanwhile he routinely meets a former high school "friend" of his, a histrionic idiot who talks about the stupidest shit. We experience how depersonalized and detached from everybody the protagonist has become. He has no interest in anything going on around him. Then one day, as he's taking the train, he sees Aiko, the odd girl he fell in love with as a child, as she's standing on the station. Their eyes meet, and the protagonist feels as if his whole existence had been in pause until he saw this girl again. He exits the train as soon as he can and runs around looking for Aiko, but she's gone.

The protagonist falls to a deeper level of despair. Before, Aiko had been someone from his earlier years, a figure locked in the mists of his blurry memories, and he had convinced himself that she had disappeared from the world somehow. But Aiko was still out there, close enough, existing as a real 18 year old girl and looking as sad and lost as she used to. The protagonist, who had been living alone for a while, falls into the kind of psychotic depression that unfortunately I have been familiar with: you hold on to life through a delusional fantasy involving an idealized female figure with a likely extremely thin connection with reality. He decides to rent another apartment, one a couple would have chosen, and imagines himself finding Aiko and daring to ask her out on a date, or more accurately to ask her to exist as close as possible to him forever and ever. He gets other part time jobs while aimlessly looking through the streets for any sight of this ghost from his past. Mentally he's disintegrating, and the author did a fantastic job of showing the depersonalization that someone in that state would go through.

Meanwhile, his uncle's sweet wife Midori keeps trying to contact the protagonist calling him, leaving him messages, etc. She worries about him and his mental state, and hopes for him to open up a bit and let her help him. There's no malice in this woman's intentions, and you can imagine the kind of emotional tension in the mind of someone who cared so much for someone she saw grow up and she had sex with at one point, and that now is drifting away not only from her but seemingly from life. And she doesn't know the half of it, because the protagonist has promised to himself that if in two years he doesn't manage to find Aiko and drag her into his delusional existence, he will hang himself.

In the last chapter, the owner of the apartment approaches the protagonist, who has been holing himself in there for a while and must look utterly terrible. He invites him for a talk, and later on to a bar. He seems to be a kind old man who knew the previous tenant of that apartment, another old man who ended up killing himself, and he sees in the protagonist the same hopeless, lonely gaze. The volume ends as we realize a woman that enters the bar and chats up the owner of the apartment is the painter of a Milky Way painting the protagonist admired and even wrote a comment about in an associated notebook, back from when he was on a date with a high schooler.

There's also a subplot that has been growing for a few volumes, about an odd cult and a cult leader that seems to be able to travel through dimensions. I don't know the author's intention with this, and I hope he doesn't screw up the main narrative, because I really don't like having such a subplot mixed up with the realistic main thread about an isolated guy on his private path towards disintegration.

[Juan Carlos malik · Rating 4 out of 5]

De nueva cuenta Inio Asano convierte su historia en hechos extraños y malvados. Donde el tema del suicidio y el dolor es una constante. Ahora toca el tema de independizarse, la mayoría de edad y el buscar un sitio en este mundo.

[Rafa Araujo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ansiedad y depresión en su punto máximo. :S

[Ami 乁⁠ ⁠˘⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠˘⁠ ⁠ㄏ (written by Jane Austen) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Punpun keeps spiralling into a rabbit hole of sadness and it's really quite painful to read but at the same time, his spiral downwards is also quite realistic. From a strange but happy boy who loved space to a teenager who has no idea what he wants from life, the growth is rather amazingly depicted.

[Johan Wilbur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joder, Asano. Eres brillante como pocos, pero cada tomo que leo de Punpun me mata por dentro más que el anterior :(

[Eni Gajanova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Malo sam se uplašila jer mi je sa poslednjim tankobonima počinjao opadati kvalitet, ali sedmi mi se za sad čini najboljim. Punpun se osamostalio, ali i dalje ga muče usamljenost, depresija i suicidalne misli💔 Nije za osetljive dušice, ali ako volite depresivne likove bez tabua onda možete da se upustite u ovo putovanje.

[Jovana Radovanović · Rating 4 out of 5]

i dalje nestrpljivo čekam prvu peticu

[Brujaxa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mejor que los anteriores. Por fin empieza a haber un rumbo (o lo parece).

[Met · Rating 4 out of 5]

Asano non ti lascia accomodare neanche un momento. Le splash page con Aiko erano fuori scala!

[Logan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars

I've been debating on what to rate this for quite a while now, and I think I've settled on four for now, as this volume connected with me more than the pre-death volumes but didn't make me want to continue as strongly as the others. This volume portrays a very realistic view of depression, and it seeps into you the longer you read this manga. It's as though every single plot point is designed for maximum misery, and I love it. There's not a ton going on, but the visuals are as stunning as ever, and that nothingness really helps you see Punpun's world, so I was left to decide which of those outweighs the other. Ultimately, I've decided on four stars, but if that changes soon, I'll let you know.

[Jesus Flores · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pun Pun 7

Pues es la vida de Punpun después del evento al final del anterior.

Me fascino el capitulo 70, con las frases de la rutina diaria de pun-pun y sus alrededores y las imágenes intercaladas, superdetalladas, ese capitulo solo se gana las 5 estrellas.

El resto del libro es el tratando de encontrarle sentido a su nueva vida, aunque en el inter y al final hay dos encuentros fortuitos.

Y por ahí lo del grupo/culto, será que???

4.4 stars

[Farhana Lüba · Rating 3 out of 5]

Um, I think something is brewing, but I don't know what it is.
Plus, I'm glad Onodera didn't forgive his mother. He shouldn't.
And...idk everything feels so bizarre.

[Kiyoyo · Rating 5 out of 5]

No se explicarlo

[Pablohoney Thebends · Rating 3 out of 5]

La verdad hace un poco de rato perdí el interés en la historia, sin embargo, quiero terminarlo
Este tomo fue la posr muerte de La madre de Punpun, la verdad sobre su padre y el comenzar su vida viviendo solo.
en donde se da plazo de dos años para desvivirse, sino encuentra a Aiko, a quien ve en la estación de trenes. Finalizando el tomo con el encuentro con la arista que tenia una galería montada con obras del espacio, a la que asistió con la chica que le gustaba y a la que casi Viol*. Ella le comenta que quiere ser ilustradora de las historias de su vida,

Uno de los capítulos tiene unos dibujos e ilustraciones de la vida diaria muy buenos, sumamente detallados.

[Nahia · Rating 4 out of 5]

4'5 en realidad.

[Raúl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Punpun se hace mayor. Y sus complejos familiares se empiezan a convertir en los de un ser adulto.

[Arley Guzmán · Rating 5 out of 5]

Las situaciones y cambios por los que debe pasar Punpun me dejan sin aliento.

[Sen Dum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ay, por favor, ni pensando en el meme de las pirámides de Egipto me quito de la cabeza la imagen de Punpun piramidal sumido en su depresión. Y aún queda casi la mitad de la obra…

[Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

Punpun cada vez está más sumido en su depresión.
Punpun ha cambiado de forma.
¿Ha empezado ya la tormenta?

[Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

4,5/5

[Vladimir Veškovac · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh... dosadno.

[Naerwen · Rating 4 out of 5]

L'état psychologique de Punpun se dégrade de tome en tome...

[sol ☼ · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5 ⭐️ Los dos primeros capítulos fueron una locura pero luego decayó un poco