Deep Love: Ayu no Monogatari

Deep Love - Ayu no Monogatari is definitely not your typical girl-finds-guy and falls in love type of romance manga. I started reading with that mindset, and after 8 chapters, I was blown away. Deep Love - Ayu no Monogatari was not only atypical, but delivers such deep themes and story to readers that will fill you with either sympathy, happiness, or anguish by the time you finish. The story is quite simple and straightforward. Ayu is a teenage girl who finds life meaningless, and thus sells her body in a society she sees as decadent and immoral. However, an encounter with a granny changes herviews, and, after listening to the granny's story of her long lost lover, Ayu becomes determined to change for the better. This is actually quite a bright summary, but the actual story isn't such a clean pavement. Many things happen along the way that will make you both love and detest Deep Love - Ayu no Monogatari. The art is quite clean and beautiful. The mangaka pays very little attention to detail, and as such, I was browsing through each page quite quickly. This is not bad however, as it offers very clean pages and very simple, but appealing backgrounds in each panel, which keeps your focus more on the story and its characters, which are the strong points of this manga. Despite how short this manga was, character development, that is, Ayu's development, is fantastic. I really sympathized with her as she struggled through the chapters. Ayu truly came alive in Deep Love - Ayu no Monogatari. Overall, Deep Love - Ayu no Monogatari was very enjoyable. Its story, characters, and the themes on morality and suffering, all of it was just remarkable.

Let me begin by stating that this review is for all the Deep Love Mangas (Ayu no Monogatari, Host, Reina no Unmei). This is my first review and i chose this manga to appraise, because it was the first one that made me cry. I won't state the contents here, because it's difficult to describe without revealing something. Just read it yourself! I'd say you have to read it, because these topics are current and concern everybody. The drawings aren't cute, but very pretty. The characters develop throughout the Manga. Love and friendship play an important role. First they seem to perish due to the cruelstoryline but in the end you'll think how necessary friends and family are. The story gets worse with every page you read. It's babaric, horrifying and endlessly sad. I don't know if you're going to cry when reading this. But i know you're gonna be touched by this awesome Manga. You will think about it several days and won't ever forget it!

After reading a review that compared Deep Love to a car wreck, that alone was enough to spike my interest. It was on the last page that I realized why it was like a car wreck. At the end you’re left there frozen in your tracks staring, at nothing, long after the car and everyone else is gone. Unable to form any coherent thoughts just a dumbstruck expression on your face. That’s what Ayu’s life was, a huge accident, one you see coming long before it hits you, yet you’re there staring at it getting closer because you are so stunned by its complexity. Wondering,trying to pinpoint the exact point in time in the story her life spiraled out of control and coming out blank because there are so many you wouldn’t even know where to start or end. Who was Ayu? A lost girl, who believed love was pointless. Living alone, selling her body for money not because she needed it, but because she felt insignificant. All that mattered to her was getting money, in her life that‘s what made the world go round. Not knowing that there was more to existing than just breathing and looking out only for yourself. Life has something new in store for Ayu and it comes in the form of an old lady’s kindness. The word love gets thrown around everywhere in manga (in my share of read ones anyway) . In this case it’s not the romantic type of love, it’s the other kind. The type that’s so rare, yet a lot of us have it but take it for granted, not giving it a second thought. Not until we lose it. I was more surprised at myself, that I enjoyed Ayu’s story so much, even though it is the story of a girls sorrowful life and not a romantic comedy. It’s Ayu picking herself up just to be slammed to the ground again by an invisible force. The choices she makes to change her life, ones she regrets and ones she would do all over again. This isn’t the type of story you laugh through, actually there are only smiles and heartwarmings, no LOL moments. If you want to laugh or feel all warm and fussy this is far from it. It’s a cruel life where the decisions you make will catch up to you, and I think that’s where this mangaka got it right. Life is unfair and sometimes will give you very few reasons to smile and though you might feel closed up and trapped, like Ayu, there is always someone who cares. The art was a little on the plain side, but that same art showed me a cover that dared me to read it, a girl crying, for a second I thought I saw wrong. Let me be the first to point out that when a manga first words are, “Care to give me a blow,” it is bound to have some ecchiness. Guaranteed even. Though graphic in context at times it never shows any nudity, not in the completely naked anyway. It’s about her story, uncensored. When all is said and done, though I agree with the car wreck, for me it was more like getting punched in the face and you don’t know who did it. In the end you’re left angry and stupefied at realistically sad story of a girl named Ayu. That being said this is the best quote that sums up what this manga is about: “Appreciation is the purest, and strongest form of love. It is the outward-bound kind of love that ask for nothing and gives everything. It is the antidote to fear. Although fear was the first feeling that developed during evolution, love is believed to be the second.”

[Spoiler Review!] After reading all the reviews here, I came to realize something. This manga is a sick attempt at using horrible events and circumstances to create a sense of "meaning" and evoke pity within the minds of readers who take the bait. Story: 2/10 The "story" here has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. The "story" revolves around our main character, Ayu, and the horrible life she lives. Many questions arise when reading this manga, such as: What happened to her parents, what caused her to start prostituting herself, what did she need the money for, and many more. The only character trait Ayu hasis that she is a teenage prostitute. That's it. Ayu eventually meets an old lady who takes pity on her and lets Ayu live with her. The granny tells a sad story about her husband that is meant to evoke further sadness towards the "story." Ayu also finds a dog later, so that's cool. Ayu also has a friend named Reina, who a group of girls hates for some unknown reason. Reina and Ayu later have sex with some old dude because the old dude just walks up and asks them how much they are paying for sex, which is something that I highly doubt happens while people are just randomly sitting somewhere in broad daylight in a public area. Oh yeah, Ayu also had a gigolo who basically forces her to do heroin and ra*es her sometimes. He had too much drug money debt and eventually begged Ayu to find a ton of money to help pay this debt. Conveniently, granny has almost all the money Ayu needs to help her gigolo out. Of course, tragedy has to strike again, and her gigolo spent the money on drugs and killed himself. Ayu just walks out and later doesn't show any sign that she cared that this happened. Reina later gets robbed by the girls who hate her, gangra*ed by the male friends of those girls, and then gets the word "wh*re" carved into her leg. There is no reasoning as to why these girls hate her enough to do this to her. Did she steal someone's boyfriend? Is it because she is overly energetic? Who knows! The manga doesn't like telling important things like this because it is too busy trying to fit as many tragic things into the manga as possible to make the reader feel sad! This whole issue is just forgotten in later chapters! Reina later tells Ayu what happened, and Ayu wants to avenge her friend! To do this, Ayu threw coffee on the main girl's head (how did she know this was the main girl?) and then stabs her in front of a huge group of people who just don't care that some high school girl was just mutilated in front of their eyes. Ayu later calls granny to pick her up, but granny has foot issues, and she fell while running over to Ayu, so her doggy comes instead. Granny later tells Ayu that she had an "adopted" child with a heart illness, and Ayu tells the granny that she sells her body for money and that she stole like 1.5 million yen from her. Granny dies the next day for some reason. Maybe she really hated teenage prostitutes that much; who knows. Fast forward, Ayu meets Yoshiyuki (Granny's "adopted" child). They like each other and start hanging out. His family doesn't let him out of the house often due to him having heart issues, so Ayu decides to take him to Okinawa because he wants to go there. When they come back, the police arrest Ayu and Yoshiyuki has a heart attack or something like that. Ayu is now not able to see Yoshiyuki and begs his dad to make him happy since she can't see him. Of course, to make the story more tragic, the dad says he can ensure that by having Ayu have s*x with him. Ayu then goes back to prostituting, catches HIV, it develops into AIDs, and she dies. The dad also kills himself, so we love a happy ending! Art: 5/10 Typical shoujo art style. Nothing much to say here. I particularly dislike the cover art for the volumes, as it looks significantly worse than the art in the manga (which is usually the opposite). Character: 2/10 Honestly, most of these characters are pretty shallow. Ayu's only personality is being a teenage prostitute who has the worst luck in the world, Reina's personality is being Ayu's friend that gets gangra*ed, and Yoshiyuki's personality is being Ayu's love interest with a tragic fate to make the readers feel sadder. Every other character in this manga are just plot devices that could be exchanged with literally anything, maybe excluding the granny. Enjoyment: 2/10 I chuckled when one of the old dudes called Reina's private part a biscuit. Overall: 2/10 In conclusion, this is an overrated and sad attempt at a tragic story that uses cheap plot tropes to trick readers into believing this to be a magnum opus of sorts. Thankfully, it was a concise read, but it is time for me to read the sequels and likely see the same exact thing all over again.