[whole series]
I can't rate it yet 'cause it being an adaptation is confusing to me.
And I still don't understand if the stars should represent my appreciation for a piece or my supposedly objective rating, which are quite different. Anyway.
I didn't read the novel so idk if the writing is any different here, I'm going to fix this.
What I most liked about this series is that there were no philosophical ramblings, except for tiny parentheses: facts were sufficiently eloquent. Wasn't it the best choice, given the meaning of it all? We didn't need a constant stream of consciousness or honest conversations to understand what was going on in the protagonist's head, which implies the author made a good job at introducing the character to us; and, even though we came to know details about his childhood only towards the end of this volume, nothing essentially changed - his reality only became sharper to our eyes.
This manga is basically a pile of intertwining climatic threads and it doesn't feel like a question at all: everything is consequential, there is a strong sense of causality here; even though the protagonist doesn't acknowledge it, the reader does.
I read a review which said that this is a superficial work on deep matters. I can't disagree more, since additions weren't needed to convey the message.
Here is a lifelong struggle to attach meaning to a reality which is only perceived at a superficial level by the protagonist, who can only give superficial answers to his questions and never ever tries to face things directly, going for circumnavigations (it's rather funny to visualize this since, even on a less visual level, the progression of the story is that of a spiral). Did I give it away, now?
The art and the panneling are good, but they could have been better to serve their purpose, so I can't consider this a masterpiece.
I appreciated that the art is parallel to the writing: internal symbols are limited to the peaks, when we're accelerating down the spiral, so that, overall, objective reality in its rawness always has the final word, without neglecting the inside but rather complementing and completing it.
Considering that the attempt to depict psychosis, internal conflicts, delusions was successful, I needed to make this positive remark.