solanin: an epilogue

After reading the original Solanin, reading this piece and being drawn back into the story and the life of the main character really brought it full circle after solanin really left a memorable place in my brain. I would highly recommend reading the first book and this epilogue. The story is one of the few manga I have read that really sticks to you after a long time.

I loved this story when it came out over a decade ago. I saw online that an epilogue was on its way about a year or so ago, so I've been waiting for this to finally become available. Was it worth the wait? Yes and no. It's 45 pages long, which is great! But the first half doesn't touch much on the story save for a bit of an environmental story to fall in the cracks of what was left behind. The second half of the epilogue is where we get to catch up with some of our characters years later. What resides in these pages is nothing cataclysmic. It is nothing Earth-shattering. It is nothing but a moment, years later, and it reads so beautifully in its simplicity. "Slice of life" is the term I've read about a few of these types of stories. It's just a day, cut for our reading pleasure. Does something necessary to the overall story happen? Not really. But we get to see our characters years later. Alive, and just....living. What the writer hits with this brief re-introduction is something emotional simply because he doesn't spoon-feed us what we need to feel, or what he's telling us to feel. He simply lets us see where the characters are, and the emotions fall on their own. Because we can see in their lives a sort of reality. When we realize in that moment the very simplicity of just another day in our own lives, that's when we, the reader, can grab the sense of the bittersweet in "life." In the characters, and in ourselves. Praise aside, this was a $5 purchase to read in Kindle, and a perfectly good price for what I got.

I loved Solanin when I read it years ago in college. I even wrote a literature paper on it focusing on its and my depression. I've reread it a couple times since then and gotten more out of it at different stages of my life. This is a short and sweet epilogue showed me a bit more about the change in perspective of characters and myself as the years have passed. Asano's notes at the end also really bring out that introspection in me. Thanks for all your work, Inio. Especially Solanin.

I gained some closure over the fate of the characters in the original Solanin manga. Overall, a pretty good read.

The epilogue was alright but I feel as if it was unnecessary.