When this series is good, it's very good. When it's bad it's very bad. I skip the Mitt-chan & one-off stalker stuff as much as possible; otherwise it's a great story. I don't know why, but the artist's drawing is actually way better in this earlier works than his later stuff.
Anyway, I thought some readers might be interested in a little context about a song that a character keeps humming. There is more than one translation of Grimm's The Juniper Tree, but the poem part goes like this:
"My mother she killed me,
My father he ate me,
My sister, little Marlinchen,
Gathered together all my bones,
Tied them in a silken handkerchief,
Laid them beneath the juniper-tree,
Kywitt, kywitt, what a beautiful bird am I!"
In the story, there is a woman who wished for a long time to have a child but she couldn't. She accidently shed blood at the foot of a Juniper tree and her wish came true and she gave birth to a son. Later she dies, is buried under the tree, and her husband remarries. The new wife has a daughter and hates the son. She kills him and makes her daughter, his little sister, believe that it was her fault. The mom tells her that she will cover it up by making his body into black pudding and the sister just cries.
When the father comes home the wife lies and says the little boy left to live with relatives and she feeds the father the black pudding. The father is upset that his son left without saying anything but he believes the story. He tosses the bones from the black pudding under the table and the sister gathers them in her silk scarf and lays them at the foot of the juniper tree. Then the bones disappear and the boy is reborn as a bird, making his sister happy. He goes around singing the song quoted above, and the sound is so beautiful that people give the bird gifts to sing it to them again.
He takes the gifts back home and sings to his family. When he sings for his father he gives him a gold chain. When he sings to his sister he gives her a pair of shoes. When the stepmother comes to see what gift she will get, the bird drops a stone mill on her head and she dies, bursts into flames under the tree, and when the flames clear the boy is back and his sister and father rejoice and apparently no one cares about the step mom. The end.
I guess Ikushima likes the poem because he had a bad family life. He's a weirdo, I dunno.