Tatsumi Onishi lavora in una pasticceria, dove sforna baumku-chen in continuazione. Arrivato a quarant'anni, per la prima volta in vita sua si innamora, ma iniziano a verificarsi una serie di fenomeni sovrannaturali inspiegabili... al punto da trasformarsi e perdere ogni traccia di umanità. Riuscirà a tornare alla quotidianità?
Minoru Furuya (古谷実; FURUYA Minoru, born March 28, 1972) is a Japanese manga artist from Saitama Prefecture.
His debut work was Ike! Inachū takkyū-bu, known in English as Ping-Pong Club, published in Young Magazine. It was adopted into a 26 episode anime in 1995. In 1996, he won the Kodansha Manga Award for Ping-Pong Club.
Two of his series have been adapted to the big screen, namely Himizu in 2011, and Himeanoru in 2016.
Four stars. The title apparently means “unnecessary” in Turkish.
This is Furuya’s latest series, finished six years ago, after his fan-favorite (at least for this fan of his) Saltiness. As usual, the story follows a man in the fringes of society, the owner of a small shop that specializes on baumkuchen, a type of pastry I wasn’t aware of but that looks delicious. As a teen, the man was urged to quit high school and become an apprentice of his father’s. Now his father is dead, and he has found himself as a nearly forty-year-old dude who knows little else other than baumkuchen, and whom nobody would love. His sole acquaintance is his twenty-three-year-old employee, an intimidating young woman who regularly pesters him with random topics such as the birth of the universe. She also finds him weak and generally pathetic.
One day, our protagonist begs his employee to eat out with him, and she reluctantly agrees because it’s his birthday. He has realized that he leads an empty life, but he opens up about the fact that he has fallen in love. The employee fears that she’s the target. However, that’s not the case: every evening, when he’s returning from work, he sees the same shapely young woman standing behind a tree at a local park, and she’s alluring enough that he can’t stop fantasizing about her, even though he has never seen her face.
The protagonist’s employee is intrigued. She urges him to head to that park and introduce himself to the woman. As he points the stranger out to his employee, though, an issue arises: he’s the only person who can see her.
Un manga che sembra volerti portare in profonde riflessioni sull'esistenza, attraverso immagini distonico e metafore un po' telefonate. Credo che in un fumetto come questo, dove il grottesco è perno centrale, l'autore abbia osato solamente dal punto di vista grafico, dove sinceramente, a parte lo sbigottimento iniziale -complice la "fredda" computer grafica- l'effetto sorpresa svanisca in breve tempo. Delusione.