Manga 126479 Mikkakan No Koufuku Suggestion

So, they finally added this to the website.

This book is incredibly painful, for all of the right reasons.

It is relatable in a cathartic and fire-starting way. The reader - typically a young man - will inevitably project all of their failings onto Kusunoki. In my case, Three Days of Happiness spurred me to take my own life a little more seriously.

That being said, it is also incredibly beautiful. Brilliantly written, it generates powerful images at every critical point of the novel. The author, Sugaru Miaki, manages to catch you completely off guard on a number of occasions. Especially in the final third of the book, ... Miaki mixes bitter and sweet deftly, creating a dark chocolatey miasma you can't help but read again and again.

This is one of only a handful of books I have ever bought and I am probably going to buy it in Japanese at some point. I number it among a select few that genuinely changed my life.

*Spoilers*

This novel is held in high regard, but it has major problems. The scenario is questionable, but not hard to get over. The main issue is that the author somehow manages to contradict everything he was trying to teach us throughout the majority of the book with an ending that's just trying too hard.

The scenario is that the attractive young love interest Miyagi is magically paired with the MC Kusunoki, with her having to be around him constantly due to circumstances. Even without changing the initial premise of selling your lifespan, was this the best way to bring the two main characters together? Maybe I'm ... just not the target audience for romance novels, but I can admit the following story was well put-together and had more than a few pleasant moments until the ending.

During the ending Miyagi sells the rest of her lifespan to die at the same time as Kusunoki because although the overarching message of the book is that love and life are precious things that you shouldn't take for granted, why use the memory of Kusunoki to enrich your life in the future when you can have what is essentially a glorified lover's suicide?

Even if the rest of Miyagi's life is valued at a low price, it's admitted in the story that subjective happiness plays no role in deciding a lifespan's value, and instead its worth is decided by objective wealth and influence. Wasn't another message that this book tries to send is that personal happiness is more important than any fame or fortune, demonstrated when Kusunoki says, "and more than the meaningful thirty days I should have spent, these last three days will be the most precious of them all."?

It's contradictory to everything else the author was trying to say. They wouldn't have been able to spend the last three days together if she hadn't sold her lifespan, but this novel would've been far more applicable to the real world if there was an epilogue about Miyagi dealing with feelings of grief and eventually moving on, because in the real world we don't get to leave things off on a high note, we have to clean up after ourselves.

This novel isn't hard to enjoy, but the ending snuffs out a large amount of potential this book had to be something I would think about for years to come.

“Hey you, were you once considered a talented kid but now you are a sad teenager? Then come read this totally relatable novel!”

If self-diagnosed le depressed sadboi blog was a novel. This has to be one of the most self-pitying pieces of fiction I’ve ever read. Keep in mind that there will be spoilers, as it’s hard to criticize the content without specifying it. If you want to read it without spoilers and my preface didn’t deter you, then go on, it’s short, come back later.

Three Days of Happiness is a drama. You might even think it’s touching if you don’t stop to actually think ... about the story. Unfortunately there are too many things that don’t exactly add up with the story. This is going to take a while.

Let’s start with the protagonist. Our dude is poor. So poor that he has to sell practically all of his possession to even be able to buy the cheapest food. Our dude is also a young man that goes to a college. No, the setting isn’t some dystopia where the economy is completely fucked. No, it also isn’t set in some third world country (or America). Seems to be regular Japan. Now I’m not an expert of Japanese law, but according to Google, Japanese parents have legal obligation to support their dependent children. The novel tries to bypass this possible solution by having the protagonist say he doesn’t want to ask his parents for help. There are first problems with it. The first one is that this doesn’t mean jackshit as the background of the relationship between the protagonist and his parents are never properly explained beyond some disagreement over the choice of college. So it makes the protagonist out to be a drama queen who would rather keep the “victim” status and wallow in self-pity than to actually solve the situation. The second is – if you don’t care about your parents, you might as well use the government to get what you’re legally owed. Certainly seems like a better future than dying of malnutrition after giving up your ever joy in life, but hey, that’s just me. Again, the stubbornness might have been believable element if the parent relationship had been properly explored.

If you didn’t get it yet, our protagonist is “terribly depressed”. This seems to be because he wanted to achieve great fame when he was a child, but that didn’t really work out and now he’s just an average Joe. The horror. Oh, and also always had trouble socializing or whatever. The average adolescent problems, but as mentioned previously, the protagonist has a terrible habit of self-pitying. The novel feels like it was made to be relatable to young unhappy people, but given the mixed messages and the moral it gives (more on that later), if you actually identify with the protagonist, consider seeking professional help. This isn’t on the level of relatively harmless self-insert of the likes of “lone wolfs” like Oreki, Hachiman or Ayanokouji. The mc here has issues and it’s not really the other’s fault.

The setting - a mysterious establishment where you can trade in your lifespan, time or health for cash. Such interesting ethical questions could be mused over, it his had been featured in a better written series. Here it’s just a device so the protagonist can kill himself but in a way we could find touching. The rule here is that you can make three transactions in your life. Rule that could have been pretty important, if the story actually used it. Or in other words, if the protagonist wasn’t dumb. So you need money, right? Perhaps you could sell some of your lifespan for money? But what’s that, your life is worth less then you thought? So what do you do?
a) try out one of the other two options
b) realize it’s a scam and try to find different non-magical way to get money, perhaps get a bit adventurous considering you’ve considered giving up your life for money
c) perhaps sell just a bit of the lifespan to feel it out, and if you’re okay with it come back to do your second transaction
d) Just say “fuck it” and exchange basically your whole life for some pocket money, because as you need money to live, it only makes sense to throw your whole life away to get money, so you can fuel your now non-existent life.
Of course, d) it is. And sure, you could say that the novel was trying to make a point of how ridiculous this decision is, but it did not give me the feel of being self-aware on such level, so I don’t think so. It certainly doesn’t do such thing on purpose. Sure, chalk up the poor life decisions to the depression, but that’ just a cop out. Maybe if depression was explored further than “Woe is me, my life is worthless, no need to live it out”, I’d accept that reasoning.

Well, at least not the protagonist has the money. Surely they will actually be put to some use, right? Nope, the protagonist continues to act poor even though he has literally just 30 days of life left. At some point he starts to literally throw the money out. Why did you even make the exchange in the first place my dude? What was the point? Or is this another “hurr durr there was no point because le depression”? It’s so tiring. It really makes me think the lifespan exchange is there just so the protagonist can kill themselves without the novel having to mention suicide. Cowardice.

Enter the designated love interest. Yep, I have beef with her too. In the first place, it would be nice if for a change there was a story with a male and female main characters that don’t fall in love just because they are around each other. Does everything that contains people of opposite sexes really have to turn into a romance? Couldn’t they just be friends? Couldn’t they just be nice to each other because they find their poor circumstances in common and feel bad for each other? Apparently not, because we need some hastily put together romance. They literally fall in love just by being in proximity. There is no character dynamic. As a wise poet once said – “He was a boy. She was a girl. Can I make it any more obvious?“. The romance feels completely unnatural and forced. And come on, a pretend date? That’s an awful, awful cliché. One when used just makes it obvious that the author has no idea how to naturally put the characters together. Oh, her circumstances you want to hear? Just another victim, of course. Shouldering a debt of their parent. Yes, this bullshit plot element again. Just default on the debt. Don’t accept the responsibility. It’s not yours. Fuck the company, don’t know don’t care. “But you probably can’t say no to them, surely they have ways to make you comply” – again, I might have accepted this excuse if the novel actually entertained the thought. If the novel showed any attempt to say no and for it to not work. But it goes like “Oi ur mom died, now you go throw your life away” “Ok.”.

I do have something positive to say about this novel – I didn’t expect the midway plottwist. In fact, I was going to write in this review that the novel is so predictable that I’ve guessed that it would end up with the protagonist somehow making his life more valuable, selling the rest of his life and freeing the girl from the debt. So it was nice to find out that his life was actually worthless from the start, the initial assessment was fake and so that will in no way happen. Sure, it makes no sense for the girl to give out her own money just so some random dude she literally just bet in her business hours doesn’t get even more sense, but at least it’s not predictable. Stupid, yes, but not predictable.

Another thing that is done better than expected is the excuse of how people don’t notice the invisible girl. Usually the story just makes the people invisible and calls it a day, as if there weren’t any ways to prove the existence of physically present object/person that just happen to be see-through (yes, I’m looking at you AnoHana). Three Day of Happiness solves this by stating that not only is the girl invisible, any action she does by interacting with the object is not seen by others. No floating cups of soda, people see it as if the soda had not been picked up in the first place. Surely, there are definitely still other ways to prove she is there, but as that is not a major plot point here, I’ll give it a pass. For a change.

Now, the great finale. Greatly stupid. Every aspect of the novel that doesn’t make sense culminates in one big nonsense. The forced romance makes the protagonist want to save the girl. The girl says no. The protagonist attempts to do so anyway. How? Well, since he’s now in love, he now has back his talent of art (you know, as mentioned at the start, previously a talented kid). Apparently he’s a great artist, so now his life is worth more. Even though he didn’t pick up a pencil for years (literally) and he just did some sketching. With the power of art and love, instead of his life whole life being worth 30 yen, less than 30 days are enough to almost free the girl from the debt. How in the fuck? Well, he would be an extremely famous artist, or so the appraisal says. In the remaining days he would become so famous he would be immortalized in art textbooks for years to come. I’d really like to know how exactly the author of the novel thinks such a feat would be possible. With some luck you could maybe go viral (and get forgotten in few more days), but in the modern times where artists with amazing skill are overlooked while banana on a wall makes the worldwide news and while vore furry artists earn enough from commissions to be set on life, irrelevant to the actual artistic value of their work) no art textbooks will care about literal nobody somewhere in Asia and his few artworks. He’d be lucky if they wouldn’t be just thrown out after his death. Talent alone isn’t enough to get famous, definitely not in such short time. Of course, this is just described as a possible future thanks to which the protagonist’s life now has value, it doesn’t in fact happen (but it could), so the author doesn’t have to write how it would happen, so the illusion of this being even possible is able to work (on some readers). With last three days remaining in his life, the protagonist is happy as he did something worthwhile in his life by saving a damsel in distress. But what’s that – the damsel did the same? She sold out her life to be able to spend three days together with the protagonist in her non-invisible form? What the fuck? And she even mentions how she has enough money left over to be considered rich, so she didn’t even have to sell all of her lifespan – but she did so anyway, meaninglessly, just to die quicker I guess. Just call it a suicide dear author, you coward. And wait, that was literally my prediction on what would happen, just with addition that makes it even more stupid. Dammit.

So, what is the moral of the story? If you’re poor your life sucks, but it will continue to suck even if you get money. If you suspect other people secretly hate you, you’re probably right. (I didn’t even cover that part of the story in this review, but it sucks too). If you feel your life is worthless, instead of actually trying to improve it, throw it away - burn it out fast. Great stuff. And what was the ending supposed to be? For all practical purposes, it’s two young adults killing themselves, one because he’s depressed, one because she fell in one with the suicidal one and didn’t want him to kill himself alone? Is that supposed to be romantic? Is that supposed to be touching? It’s stupid. Laughtable, even. Poor attempt at depicting depression, in a way glorifying it. At least it’s just a single volume, so the misery didn’t take that long.