Deep Love – Ayu no Monogatari is both a beautiful story about love and apathy, as well as a terrible story about despair. This manga is not for the faint of heart. It gives you a cruel reality check – making you feel like you’re experiencing the same horrible things as the MC does. At times, I found it hard to read because there were just too many depressing things happening. But that’s real life. Real life is ugly and horrible at times, and THAT’S what this manga is showing you. Right on a silver platter.
If you're planning on reading the Deep Love series this is my recommended reading order:
1. Ayu no Monogatari
2. Host
3. Reina no Unmei
Pao no Monogatari can be read whenever or not at all. I would recommend that you read it after Ayu no Monogatari though.
Story:
The story follows Ayu, a 17 year old prostitute with no life goals and no sense of purpose. She doesn’t care about her life, her happiness or even the money she’s selling her body to obtain. She thinks she’s dirty and hopeless – there’s no future in sight. Then one day she meets an old lady with a completely different perspective on life. The lady, “Granny”, is kind and forgiving, and slowly but surely Ayu’s perspective on life starts to change. She’s not fully ready to change her life for herself, but maybe she can do it for someone else?
The story switches between being hopeful one moment, and depressing the next. The theme throughout is dark and mature, tackling taboo topics like prostitution, suicide and rape. Therefore, I strongly recommend you to think hard before reading this if you’re sensitive to those kinds of topics.
If you do, however, decide that you want to read this, then I say go ahead. It’s a very well executed story with powerful scenes and great plot progression. The pacing is good. It’s fast enough that you don’t get bored, and it’s slow enough that you have time to breathe between scenes. The ratio of happy vs sad scenes is also good. It has its fair share of happy moments so it’s not a complete down-fest. But like I said before, it’s still a very depressing story overall.
Art:
I would say the art is average. There’s nothing particularly wrong about it, but it’s not outstanding either.
The backgrounds are often kept solid or with very little detail, but it varies from each page. There are a few scenes where the backgrounds look beautiful and neat with lots of textures.
It’s obvious the artist focused more on drawing the characters than the backgrounds. The characters are more detailed and they have some really strong facial expression. I never felt like their poses looked unnatural or stiff, but rather the opposite. They look very alive and real.
One thing I really liked about the art is how they showed the slight changes in a characters’ appearance over time. There’s one character that becomes ill and as you read the manga you can see how the illness affects that persons’ physique. How this particular change is drawn is very well done and I wish other artists would take note.
Characters:
Even though it’s a very short manga, some of the characters really stuck with me. I particularly liked Ayu and Granny, and watching their friendship grow was especially heart-warming.
Ayu is a well written MC and she’s definitely not your typical female protagonist. She has strengths and flaws that balance each other out, as well as some conflicting feeling about the problems she faces throughout the manga. She’s a very interesting person to follow and I’m glad I got to experience her story from her own perspective. Overall, she’s a pretty complex character that grows throughout the story as she tries to figure out who she really is.
Granny is another great character. She’s very different from Ayu when it comes to her outlook on life as she believes the world is beautiful and not ugly. Granny is an eternal optimist who sees the good in other people. She’s not as complex as Ayu is, but that doesn’t mean she’s not interesting. I don’t think anyone could hate Granny.
Reina and Yoshiyuki were other characters I really liked, but they weren’t fleshed out enough for me to give them a fair look-over.
There were a few characters I didn’t like. Not because they were bad characters, but rather because they were bad people. Neither of these “unlikeable” characters were fleshed out, and I would have liked to read more about them to understand their reasoning and motivation better.
Overall:
I was very pleasantly surprised when I read this manga. It’s different from any story I’ve read, and even though it’s dark and depressing, it’s still a hopeful story in a way. I think a lot of people can learn from this manga. One of the core messages about this it is that Ayu could be any one of us. It’s so easy to fall into a bad spiral of despair, and it’s not as easy to get out. By reading this you might get a better understanding of the people that actually go through these things, and maybe even get the courage to help someone in need.
Recommended to:
I recommend this manga to people who like to read more mature stories and that are not put-off by dark and taboo topics. If you like to read dark stories from the victims’ perspective, then this one is for you.
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