”Is this… what my face looks like?”
Creative Staff:
Story & Art: Asano Inio
Translation: JN PRODUCTIONS
What They Say:
Punpun gave himself a strict DEADLINE
By the time his lease is up, he and Aiko will be together, his life will be better and he’ll BE someone…
OR ELSE.
Hey, Punpun, your lease just RAN OUT.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Each release of Goodnight Punpun is like visiting an old friend. Since you haven’t seen them in a while, there’s some gaps in their history you try filling in from either memory or current context, but you’ll never get the full story no matter how hard you try. As you’re introduced to the cast now in their early twenties, this is more apparent than ever. Characters like Seki have become even more jaded, Shimizu has fallen prey to a cult, Aiko is now a magazine model, and Punpun continues to float aimlessly through life.
Following the revelation of cult leader Hoshikawa running for mayor, the main cast continues going about their life as always. While the cult itself is made out to be this bombastic group of oddballs and outcasts, within the world of the story they’re treated with as much disdain as any other cult. Their real threat doesn’t settle in until Shimizu himself gets roped in by them. After Seki’s anger gets the better of him and he lashes out at Shimizu, the two spend some time apart, each falling further into their own eccentricities that have been kept at bay previously because the two balance each other out so well. Now without the constantly out-of-it Shimizu, Seki slowly begins to relinquish humanity, having been exposed to too many of its dark asides. And without someone to protect him from the world’s dark asides, Shimizu ends up easily swayed by Hoshikawa’s cult ramblings. This is further underlined by author Asano taking the rare moment to provide a brief backtrack, establishing how the two became friends in the first place.
In a similar manner, Sachi and Punpun begin to fall out of sync with each other. With Sachi’s drive to create a manga on her own terms, she not only bumps heads with her editor, but with her co-creator Punpun as well. Ramblings about the current state of the manga industry and the fanbase as a whole serve as a nice camera wink moment for Asano to vent his own frustrations with the world he works in while also serving as a point of contentment for the pretentious Sachi. By all means, you should feel off-put by Sachi at this point, but her single-mindedness has served as one of the more human things any of the cast members have done in recent memory, so you end up sticking to her as the series’ current anchor instead. Punpun does just this, though relying solely on the kindness of friends for a stable life soon proves to do more harm than good.
Shortly after Mr. Shishido, Punpun’s kindly landlord, gets critically injured, Punpun’s brief spell of living happily among friends comes to an end. Having initially been a father figure of sorts to Punpun, Shishido’s sudden absence in Punpun’s life is a massive hit not just to Punpun, but to Sachi and the others in their immediate circle. Simple get-togethers have become that much more difficult to do for Punpun, who is back to freefalling through life without any set trajectory.
Rather than repeating Punpun’s isolated depression-fests from earlier chapters, however, Asano takes a different course of action this time around. Having previously been exposed to what a fulfilling life with friends can provide, Punpun now yearns for that but simultaneously is ashamed to show himself to his current friends, convinced he is no good to any of them. That said, he ends up making the rash decision of taking on a new identity entirely, acting purely on the desire of appeasing those around him rather than staying true to his own personality. He can function among others perfectly well, but it’s at the cost of literally losing who he is, instead taking on the name and lifestyle of a former neighbor. This is only further worsened when he ends up meeting Aiko by chance, seeing it as an opportunity to follow through on an impossible promise they made as children.
The idea of childhood crushes destined to become a fully-realized relationship is a trope that even modern stories still stick to. So of course Inio Asano had to find a way to pervert it and expose it for the shameful impossible expectation it truly is. Being reintroduced to Aiko, we soon find that her life living under a cult-worshipping mother has gone about as well as you’d anticipated, even with her handful of accomplishments she’s achieved regardless. It’s in this manner that Asano really brings home the fact that people’s lives aren’t of their own choosing, but a strange penance of sorts for being in the wrong place, wrong time, or even just being born as the wrong person. Issues of identity and fate come crashing down eventually culminating in one of the most intentionally hollow, ugly, emotionless sex scenes Asano has ever written.
In Summary:
With enough time having passed since the first volume, Goodnight Punpun omnibus 5 does an excellent job of finally coming full circle in terms of touching down on the original cast and their current life. Piecing together the gaps in their life is a bit muddled, and you’ll definitely hear some names that you swear you heard in earlier volumes, but it’s this slight disorientation that makes the narrative all the more enjoyable (read: soul-crushing, but in a manner that makes for a good story).
Content Grade: A
Art Grade: A+
Packaging Grade: A
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: 18+
Released By: VIZ Media LLC
Release Date: March 21, 2017
MSRP: $24.99
