Homunculus Manga Review

Wow. What to say about this manga. This is easily the craziest manga I have ever read. People get lured to psychological genre because it makes you think and question yourself. And if thats your thing, you are in for a treat. Homunculus will not disappoint. The story follows the life of Susumu Nakoshi, a 34 year old man who used to be rich but decided to take an extended vacation to discover himself by living as a homeless person. But having lived the better part of his life as a rich person, he is not able to completely indulge into the secluded life of a homeless. To cope with this internal struggle, he lives in his car, thus hanging halfway between the life of a homeless and a "normal" person. Meanwhile, he meets Manabu Ito, a doctor who offers him money which he direly needs. In exchange, he would become part of an experiment which would involve drilling a hole in his skull. This is a real life occult procedure called "Trepanation" and is followed by cults in some parts of the world. The procedure is supposed to help you use your brain to its full potential by increasing blood flow to your head. Rubbishing these claims, Nakoshi accepts the deal just for the money. But to his surprise and disbelief, due to the operation, he starts seeing illusions in the form of weird monsters, called Homuculus, which for some reasons, he ends up believing as hidden messages to him. The story which follows is about how these illusions change Nakoshi's life and depicts his internal struggle as he realizes how connected these illusions are to his own life.



Homuculus tries to showcase how empty our lives have become in today's industrialized world and how centred it all is around money. You get to see the world from homeless's point of view and so it also deals with issues like income disparity. You might also develop your own philosophy observing everything that goes on in the manga. Its difficult to talk about the story without spoiling things but you get to see inside the minds of various people, revealing their deepest desires, fears and most concealed (and significant) parts of their life.

But what makes this manga so crazy and different is how freely the thoughts of the characters flow without any barriers or censors. It takes complete liberty with even the most controversial and taboo thoughts that occur to us almost all the time and realizes their significance in shaping our personality. So if you get easily grossed out by weird sexual situations in fiction, then read this manga with caution. The story takes complete liberty with sexuality. In fact, the persona of a lot of major characters is in some way or other highly associated to sexual reasons. There are some gay scenes, cross-dressing scenes, rape scenes and some even weirder stuff you could never have imagined existed. At one point, I was compelled to doubt the mental stability of the author himself. There is just too much crazy stuff to talk of. Seeing the psyche of the characters getting so brutally opened up, you might end up messing your own mind by drawing conclusions from your own past.

The art is great and well suits the nature of the story. There are a lot of face close ups which serve the purpose of showing the enhanced expressions of the characters. The disturbing drawings do justice to the disturbing thoughts portrayed. Overall, I have no problems as far as art is concerned.

The only problem I have with this manga is that it becomes too difficult to follow in some parts. It becomes too difficult to draw conclusions from events so you end up completely confused. Confusion to some extent is understandable and expected since the whole story unfolds based on hallucinations that our disillusioned mc sees, but I think there should have been a tad bit more clarity. Even while reading some of the most important events, you will be confused as to how the plot lead to this point. So multiple reading might be required. But still many things are left to the imagination of the reader. This criticism is certainly not a deal breaker though. What's really astonishing is that, even with the heavy content, this manga makes for a very fast and highly addictive read. I marathoned it in just 8 hours. So if you are free one day and are looking for some psychological craziness, go for it. This is a great manga and something the fans of psychological genre can not miss at any cost. 9/10 (Great)

Golden Boy Anime Review: Ecchi Comedy

So I am only recently starting to get into ecchi anime and was looking for an ecchi comedy and this title came forward in the top recommendations in my search. I must say I wasn't disappointed. This anime is hilarious!

Golden Boy is about a 25 years old, easy going, job hopping, part-timer Kintaro Oe who loves to observe people he comes across on his journey. And of course he meets a lot of women along the way and somehow ends up seducing them(you gotta love ecchi for these crazy plots :p). Character of Kintaro is of a very simple minded yet super intelligent boy who is kind hearted and loves doing new things. I found him quite similar to Onizuka from GTO(except for the intelligence, of course) and this kind of character fits quite well in a comedy setting. We see him going job to job meeting new people and learning about several professions. He is always taking notes which mostly are sketches and measurements of women he meets and occasionally his observations about people. He seems to have a fetish of toilets and really gets turned on by cleaning toilets while imagining women sitting on them(those scenes are hilarious xD). The only thing that always stays with him is his all time partner, his bicycle. He rides it everywhere using it for jobs and we even get a complete episode with his bicycle in the limelight. As the show is episodic, the side characters aren't very complex and mostly include non-important people working at offices with one main female lead in each episode whose life Kintaro dramatically changes with his charismatic personality and surprising actions.

At only six episodes, the anime is very short and is actually a OVA series. Each episode has a separate story but we do get a finale episode which features characters from all six episodes. Half of the episodes are complete crazy with unnatural plots and other half are kind of more serious. You will get plenty comedy in all of them though. I personally liked the crazy episodes more. The anime features mature content with occasional scenes that involve female nudity, orgasms and a lot of sexual settings so parent guidance is recommended. From what I read, the anime is actually a toned down version of the manga, which almost seems pornographic. But I was surprised at the amount of detail it showed in some of the professions it featured.

Art and animations is typical 90s style animation but like most classic anime it just works. I never felt anything lacking on that part. Classic animation has its own taste and can sometimes feel better suited in some settings. The kind of expressions that you get in this anime, the quick transitions from poker faces to surprised perverted faces, I doubt they would come out this good in modern animation. So I don't really have much complains on the animation part.

Music is also on point. There are several OSTs for different situations and all of them work really good for building up and preparing you for the scenes to come. Sometimes sexy peppy songs with english lyrics will pop up in really weird situations that will make the scene even funnier. There is nothing special about the opening track but it works according to the vibe of the anime and even without any lyrics will prove to be memorable and is sure to give you that nostalgic feeling when you listen to it after a while.

Overall Golden Boy is a great anime and is very well written specially for an ecchi. It is short and will keep you gripped. You will find plenty of hilarious scenes with high rewatch value. Watch this anime if you want to lighten up your mood and get a big freakish perverted smile on your face. This is surely a memorable one. Highly recommended!