Akai Mi Hajiketa

Akai Mi Hajiketa is a collection of 13 beautiful short stories with a common theme, and that theme is love. Because it is an anthology, it's not incredibly easy to generalize my views across all stories, because even though I say that the common theme is love, it doesn't mean it's all about romance. This is an anthology that celebrates the idea of love in all its form, whether it is the romance between two people who spent eight years together only for it to fall apart, whether it is the love for life itself, whether it is the love between friends and companions whofollow a similar dream or whether it is just an unrequited crush. Each story, of varying length, focuses on an episode in the lives of various people of different ages. Some of these stories are very short, taking only a handful of pages to tell, while some are longer, going into more details. Some stories do stand out more than the others. There are those that leave you happy after you're done. And there are those that leave a rather odd after-taste. There are also some that might not affect a person at all. These emotions will depend on the reader, but needless to say, the anthology does manage to create a ripple across an entire plethora of feelings that a reader might experience. Which is what makes this collection of short stories so good. As an added bonus, there is a 14th omake chapter that gives an epilogue to some of the more prominent stories in the book. There's not much else to say about this anthology without breaking into the details of each and every story. The art is reminiscent of works by authors such as Yoshida Motoi. It is a charming style with well drawn characters and nice attention to details in the backgrounds as well. The art style brings out the emotions felt by the characters beautifully, and that in itself is not only an incredible feat, it is also necessary since the stories lose their luster without these emotional characters. I will highly recommend this collection for people who love romance and slice-of-life stories.