Ayako review

Ayako is a Seinen manga created by the prolific Osamu Tezuka in the early 1970s. It is the story of one incredibly dysfunctional family's downward spiral into suffering due to greed, rampant misogyny, and dark secrets.
The story is quick to flush out any glimmers of hope or relate-ability in its cast and situations, and focuses on morbid themes of rape and murder alongside the gritty politics of the time. While the story is meant to be an overarching metaphor for the state of Japan during reconstruction after WWII, it is still astonishing how little some of these characters act like realistic human beings (and that's not really a criticism! It's just an observation that put me off at first).
Even Ayako, the Tenge family's sole 'innocent' survivor, felt the most inhuman by the end of the story- she became a product of all the family's vices mixed together into one woman.

I read the majority of Ayako alone on my couch, but for the later half my roommates were around, and just to keep myself in good spirits during this depressing shitshow of a manga, I would occasionally tell them about the wild events of the story, and they ended up getting pretty invested by the end- which was quite entertaining.

I wouldn't recommend Ayako to anyone who isn't ready for a hardy, possibly painful read. It's a good manga, but it sure took a lot of willpower for me to get through it.

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