What would you do if massive, uncontrollable nosebleeds ruined your sex life?
Creative Staff
Story: Paru Itagaki
Art: Paru Itagaki
Translation: Tomo Kimura
Adaptation: Shaenon K. Garrity
Touch-up Art and Lettering: Stephen Dutro
What They Say
A one-shot graphic novel starring very human characters from the unique imagination of Paru Itagaki, creator of Beastars!
Whenever Mako Higari comes in contact with something she perceives as dirty, she gets a massive nosebleed. How can she find a loving partner and commit to a meaningful intimate relationship when just touching another person makes her bleed out? Especially when most of the men she meets are sleazy creeps! Her first challenge might be learning to love herself… Plus, a short story starring Santa Claus as we’ve never seen him before!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
On the surface, it would seem that Mako Higari has it all. At 29, she’s got a good job, is attractive, and basically has the pick of any man she chooses. Anybody who met her would think that she doesn’t have any worries in the world. Anybody who met her would be wrong, however.
It’s not obvious on first glance, but Mako Higari has a problem. She might have her pick of any man she chooses, but at 29, she’s actually still a virgin. Ever since she was a little girl, any time she touches something that she considers dirty, she gets a massive nosebleed, one which covers anybody and anything in her immediate vicinity the in the crimson flow. And what can be more dirty than sexual activity? So any time she begins to get intimate with a partner, the blood begins to flow freely. Understandably, this tends to scare off any and all of her paramours before anything can be consummated.
At this point in her life, she is beginning to get a little desperate. She worries that she will never be able to enjoy the passionate embrace of a man, and this worry drives her into more and more extreme situations where she attempts to throw herself at virtually every man that crosses her path, regardless of the circumstances, and this incessant determination just makes matters worse. However, it turns out that her ill-timed hemorrhaging is nowhere near as frustrating or scary as when Ryunosuke, an old childhood classmate, re-enters her life, and he is the one person in the world that does not trigger her nosebleeds.
For much of the time that I was reading Drip Drip, I found myself wondering what it was that I had gotten myself into. The first few chapters follow a basic structure: Mako finds herself in a random situation with a guy (meets him in the break room at work, at a restaurant, under a collapsed building, etc.), she throws herself at said guy who counts his lucky stars that such a beautiful woman is interested in him, things begin to get hot and heavy, and then her nose explodes, and the guy runs off. Rinse and repeat. There’s something in her desperation that is equal parts humorous and heart-breaking that is somewhat reminiscent of Tomoko’s need and subsequent lack of ability to be popular in WataMote, but I had a hard time wrapping my head around the blood construct. It is a concept that, on paper, has the potential to be an interesting angle, but the sheer volume of the blood she expels combined with the gratuitousness of it threatened to make a mockery of what we slowly realize is a serious psychological issue for Mako. Absurdity can underscore tragedy, but Drip Drip’s absurdity often overwhelmed it.
The series starts to find a little bit of ground when Ryunosuke comes into the picture. His introduction comes when he lends a sympathetic ear to her troubles, soon revealing that they had once been classmates and that he had had a crush on her. Like with all the other men in her life, she immediately throws herself at him, but unlike all of the other men, this time, she does not explode in a bloody mess. This causes her to begin re-evaluating her life and examining the root causes of her issues, which stem from childhood complexes inflicted upon her by her mother after her father was discovered to be a serial cheater. We start to get into some interesting examinations which begin to shed something of a different light on the experiences we witness earlier in the volume. The problem is that we don’t really spend enough time on these examinations. They ask some interesting questions and begin to give us some keen insights, but we stop short of the sort of psychological profile that I think this series is really begging for in order to reach that next level, which in turn just highlights the negative impact the absurdities have on the overall tone of the story. This is made all the worse as her relationship with Ryu suffers its own series of absurdities, leaving us ultimately with a conclusion that falls a little flat and left me still wondering what exactly it was that I just read.
As a final note, this volume concludes with a short story about Japan’s Santa (there’s a different one for each country in the world, apparently) hiring a prostitute just to give himself a reason to give her all of the presents he had accidentally neglected to give her when she was a little girl and helping her to realize her own self-worth. Similar to Drip Drip, it’s something of an absurd premise that threatens to get very interesting, but it is unfortunately far too short for it to really justify the mood it is attempting to achieve.
In Summary
I’ve been somewhat negative in this review, so I feel I should be clear now and say that I did not dislike Drip Drip. Once you accept the premise, there’s a lot of potential here, and I really felt for Mako in her situation. But it is a tale that never really capitalizes on the emotional weight that it takes on. Mako is a very broken person, and I think that there is a fascinating story that she is desperate to tell, but the manga never really commits to fully understanding how broken she is nor how we can potentially go about fixing her. In doing so, any emotional impact it could have had is blunted, leaving a sense of disappointment. When I was done, it left me in a weird state where I was both glad it was over and wishing there was more to come so that we could get to know her better. I certainly wouldn’t recommend against Drip Drip, but it’s also not one I will be hurrying to revisit. Thumbs in the middle.
Content Grade: C+
Art Grade: A
Packaging Grade: A
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: 18+
Released By: Viz Media
Release Date: October 18, 2022
MSRP: $12.99
