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Welcome to Manga Mania May 2016. Let’s get this month started wth a real tearjerker; Anohana.
Six childhood friends drift apart after one of them, a girl named Menma, drown. Ten years after the incident, the ghost of an older looking Menma appears and apparently cannot pass on to the afterlife. The only one who can see her is Jinta, the “leader” of the group of friends. She says that she needs him to fulfill a wish for her, before she can pass on from this realm. But the problem is that she doesn’t know what it is. Jinta then gathers their estranged childhood friends (Poppo, Anaru, Tsuruko and Yukiatsu) and ask for their help in finding out what it could be that Menma wished for.But once they are all together, they realize that they have to deal with hidden feelings, internal conflicts and old bitterness before they can help not only Menma, but themselves as well.
This series is about mourning. Some believe that it’s something you need a certain amount of time to do before you move on with your life.
That is not true.
When someone we care about dies… we can’t just get over it. It’s not something we just get over. Sure, we move on with our life, but the loss is still there. Something is still missing, and it can never be undone. And it’s not only that we miss that person, but also how it affects us. We change, not always for the better. And there are things we don’t say to others, or worse; get to talk about years later, resulting in ripping up an old wounds, if they had ever healed in the first place.
In other words, mourning is complicated. And this series gives us a bittersweet and as realistic as possible tale about how five young men and women are still in pain over the loose of their friend. They just never realized it or tried to ignore it, which, of coarse, was a really bad idea that resulted in them becoming dysfunctional one way or another. And the portrait of these characters is done very well an without sugarcoating it.
This slice-of-life tale is one of the most touching stories I have read in a long time, but I think I would recommend the anime-version rather than the manga.
That’s all for now.
One down, 30 to go.
I’m Waezi2, and thanks for wasting time with me.
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