tech

Actually incredible read. Like a surreal, painful and heart-wrenching cross between Madoka, This is how you lose the Time War and Boogiepop- Methodically plotted out with some truly beautiful prose and wonderful character writing. Inhabiting the perspective of a girl who repeats every day 5 times over and remembers it all, despite the rest of the world only remembering one of those days that happened is already pretty evil but Usa goes out of his way to make this torment nexus be as painful as possible. And that's probably why the sapphic relationship works so well between the main duo. A girl detached from her sense of humanity itself and a girl who can't help but be drawn to her every single loop, over and over, breaking down all her walls. It's brilliant and just keeps that momentum going for its rather lengthy 320 page ordeal. I can't recommend it enough honestly, but do bear in mind you will have to scrounge around for the fanTLs. It's truly unfortunate this never got an official release despite being one of the best Yuri stories I have ever read.

Unbelievably good read. It's at once a tale that speaks to truest sense of existential dread and deep seated wonder that the unknowable, abyssal depths of ocean invoke, and at the same time this portrait of grief and moving on and dealing with the gradual loss of someone who almost feels transient even in their existence. I don't want to give away too much but its the layers of abstraction and thematic motifs that elevates this from something like Vandermeer's penchant for weird fiction and more towards something that is but the lived experience of being a human and everything that entails. And it's kinda incredible that it does all this in only 220 pages or so. Feels tight in a way i feel modern books often tend not to be. Not that there isn't a point in the meandering nature of prose and what it can add but there is something to books like this where the experience of reading feels like a gentle sea breeze.

favorite quote (out of so many i have lost count): "Grief is selfish: we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person—but more than that, we cry because it helps. The grief process is also the coping process and if the grief is frozen by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope."

(Series review, rather than just the volume itself)

There are so few pieces of media I have experienced that are as profoundly empathetic and kind to the sheer act of living, and what it means to be a human being. In the same way that Asa lacks another word to describe her loneliness. In the same way that the love we have for the people in our lives is indescribable with anything but. In the same way that the pain, and hurt, and sadness we feel is tangibly our own. Ikoku Nikki, in that very same way, finds its own wonderful verbiage to string together a tapestry of the lives of people from all walks of life, and gives voice to the things they continue to grapple with. It's the way the series consistently puts into abstract notations, that it's okay to feel what we do. It's okay to love what we love. It's okay to be sad, be happy, be mean, be rowdy, feel anything we want to feel because all of those things are for our lonesome to feel and no one can take that way.

"Empowering", "Profound", "Empathetic", "Kind", "Beautiful", "Warmth". Whatever I seem to write about this work seems to contain my thoughts jumbled together within this same set of adjectives and verbs. Maybe there are more ostentatious, more proper ways to describe what Ikoku Nikki means to me. But maybe it doesn't matter. These words. These characters. These ineffable moments strewn throughout these 11 volumes. What they made me feel, is mine and mine alone to know.