A very tentative 3.5 stars

I...I don't know how to feel about this one. Reiji's life is an extremely grim one. Seemingly locked into his life situation with seemingly no way out of it. Treated like trash by his childhood "friend", stuck trying to support his mother while she cares for their dementia-stricken grandmother and violent shut-in older brother. He has not been allowed to choose his future, so in his eyes. he has no future, except to work doing menial labor in his dying small town, forever. He meets Nagi, a former (?) pop idol who asks him "Hey, do you want to die together?" The overarching plot for the volume is Nagi and Reiji talking about committing suicide, either together or separately. I can't tell if this manga is romanticizing suicide or just being very strange about it? I know suicide in Japan is viewed differently than how it is in other countries, but it's still very baffling how blase it is about the subject. Neiji keeps teeter-tottering between living and dying. He keeps flickering between the two, trying to weigh the pros and cons of his current life or just dying. Is death better when your life is so miserable you might as well be living dead? (The answer is NO, by the way, there is ALWAYS a way out and life is always the better option, even if the way is extremely difficult.) This manga is honestly deeply unsettling, and if someone has a history of suicidal ideation, extremely upsetting. I felt myself reading on in the "It's terrifying but I can't look away...I need to know what happens next for my own closure" way. I also should not have double-tasked and read this while listening to someone play a Japanese horror game.

SPOILERS BELOW!!!!

Also, the fact that a teenager is sleeping with a 20-year-old is very...yikes. I'm going to hope he's somewhere close to eighteen since he's talking about getting a full-time job that year. But seeing as Nagi herself does "Oh, I'm breaking the law" whilst sleeping with him...yikes. Also not sure how I feel about it being made out as if Nagi sleeping with Reiji was erotic or something. It wasn't. It was so uncomfortable to read. Also extremely confused by Nagi, who is only twenty, being married to a forty-six-year-old man. It's been told to the reader, over and over, her husband is a bad person. But...bad how? What did he do? ( )