Damn this update reminded me how invested I was into this manga. Too bad some spoilers said that the ending isn’t good though... at least I hope I can still enjoy everything the manga has to offer before it ends
What a great manga. Not to everyone’s tastes but the pacing was good, the atmosphere and and the tension were well balanced , what a twist though.. 8/10
Wow, people really didn't like this manga... I thought it was great. Not the most amazing thing I've ever read, but I don't have anything really negative to say about it. Seems like most people are upset about how the ending happened, and I'll admit it did seem odd but after thinking about it, I can pretty much excuse it for one very specific reason...
Not all stories follow the same structure. I don't know what it's called normally, but I call ones like this, "snapshot stories." The focus is to see the depth of human character by following an event you could find anywhere in the real world—a small town's crosswalk, for example. The ending seldom matters in snapshot stories, because the purpose is the journey.
It sounds like cheap justification, but I don't think Okuru Kotoba follows a normal structure, so I don't think it should be judged normally. It would be like hating a horror movie for not having romance or comedy—it's just, fundamentally not built that way. Like I said before, I know you might think that this a weak excuse for what you might believe to be a terrible story, but honestly the second half of why I thought the ending was fine is because you can spot it coming from a mile away if you pay close enough attention to how everyone behaves...
And so, onto the character analysis portion! XDXD
There was always something wrong with Sahara, we knew that from the moment we learnt about how he handled Taku's manga situation. As he progressed, the disparity between what he was saying, and what was happening was getting greater and greater. And then he started losing time/consciousness and getting his injuries back—he clearly wasn't dead.
Chiaki's inability to express urgency was always there, the whole "smiling during fucked up situations" thing is a genuine trauma response—it's called the "Inappropriate Affect," when what you're feeling and what expressions you're making don't match up. And what's more traumatic for a child then seeing the mangled body of someone you love? What convinced me she was innocent though was in Chapter 9—specifically her response to Mei attacking her. Killers that do it for enjoyment, don't behave like that. It was the first time we got a good look at her wish to be punished for what she thought she did to Mit-tan.
And also, it's a common narrative device to prime up a significant twist by doing a smaller version much earlier in the story. They do this in the next chapter, with Chiaki being blameless in Taku's fall down the steps (the closest name I can think of for this is foreshadowing, but that's not quite what I'm describing here... so maybe like, scaling foreshadowing?).
The parents decision to fake their deaths... I can explain Mit-tan, but maybe not Sahara... Telling everyone he was dead was profoundly cruel. At the very least if we could've palmed the bad decision on the parents and had the teacher be very upset about the lie, then it would click better but... nah. That one is hard to justify for sure.
In the case of Mit-tan though, it sounded to me like it wasn't her parents that said she was dead, it was Kenta. From what I recall, all the parents did was keep the whole incident quiet—which is reasonable. Who wants to be swarmed with people during one of the hardest times of your life? As for Kenta and Chiaki, the only reason he said that to her is because he didn't want her to waste her life atoning for something that wasn't her fault. If she knew Mit-tan was in a coma, she absolutely would've visited her in the hospital... everyday, forever. She even stays true to that claim she made ten years prior, when she actually does discover that Mit-tan is alive.
There's probably more to say about the others, but I don't want this to get any longer lmao.
In summary, I think that if you're looking for something disposable to read while you're doing laundry or eating dinner then you're going to think this is a shit story. And in that way, it kinda is. But if you're willing to look at it from another angle, cut it some slack and think about the story as a whole, then there's a lot of gold to be struck here.
