This manga left me dumbstruck. It's one of those stories that leaves you sitting there reevaluating the whole meaning of your existence for a half hour after you read the last page.
It's dark. It's provoking. It's tragic. It's romantic. It's fantasy. And yet it all seems very real to me, not in superficial content, but philosophically. As much as I hate philosophy, this story had me desperately dancing around the idea of fate and destiny, trying to decide if I liked the idea this story projects, despite how much it terrifies me to think about it.
If you want a simple, sappy love story, walk away. If you want happy feelings and moe flowers, walk away. If you want to read a shallow romance that can be found in any number of other shoujo mangas, WALK AWAY.
But if you want a story that has you pondering why exactly you are here in this world, and how love is almost never perfect or reasonable, and what is the overall effect your choices could have on an entire world, this is for you.
I don't care if you don't care about all that stuff. If you read this story, and I mean really READ it, don't just take it at face value and give up as soon as something doesn't seem to make sense, if you really read it and try to understand it all, then your mind will explode with all the thoughts streaming through your head. Or you'll sit there staring blankly at the floor because the sheer psychological aspect leaves you drained and speechless and thoughtless after the ending unexpectedly hits you with its full force.
This might seem a bit over dramatic, but I'm just describing my reactions after reading it the first time, and then again a second, and both times had a profound affect on my being, just in a different way from each other. Honestly, the first time left me with a sense of dread, left me wondering about what exactly I just read and how it pertained to me. It made me think about something I never thought I COULD think about. It started my quest for other stories that would leave me dangling over a psychological coma-inducing cliff. I never found one quite like this. So I read it again, and the force of the message hit me even harder, the things that kind of confused me the first time (even though I sort of put everything together, I still had a few loose ends) suddenly clicked and landed on me like a thousand pound bag of bricks. And I couldn't move, and I was thrilled and exhilerated and filled with a pleasant sort of fear and sadness. And it was so much that my brain shut down and I couldn't form a coherent thought for a good 10 minutes.
And who knows, maybe I'm just a psychology junkie who resents mainstream romance, even though I read it more often than anything else. Maybe my psychological and philosophical roller coaster ride is more than most of you want to deal with. Maybe I'm just weird. But I know I can't be the only one who is mentally understimulated by most works of fiction out there, and it is with those people who are like me that I want to share this story.
P.S. To those of you who are confused by the little boy with the ball, I assure you, it is very relevant to the overall story. If you can't understand it, just LOOK AT THE BIGGER PICTURE. Or read it again. Everything might just click the second time around like it did for me.