In the deepest night, I dance to the dark day
Since you are reading this review, you know the previous volume of Good Night and you know what happened. Punpun finally met Aiko. At first, they both lied, pretending to be idealized versions of young adults, model representatives of their generation. However, they finally managed to find, and our hero in the shape of you-know-what he finally experienced the longed-for closeness … And for at least one chapter it seemed that he and his dream girl would save each other.
With this the fifth volume ended. At the beginning of the sixth, they went to visit Aiko’s mother, a mad sectarian, violent and compassionate woman. Her behavior pushed Punpun to a radical act that would change his whole life. As before, the change of mood and attitude towards the world is expressed by its silhouette – it takes on human shapes, we see what it is wearing, how it moves … and only the head remains a black hole with a pair of horns sticking out of it.
The new Punpun is not afraid of anything anymore, because he has nothing to lose. He lost all the way, turned out to be a bad person, he doesn’t deserve the happiness that was so close. And maybe that’s why he finally takes Aiko on a trip to Kagoshima, which he had promised her in elementary school. And besides? He takes revenge all over the world, but mostly on himself.
great Escape
But don’t count on fifth gear on this route. Unless not to concentrate on Punpun? After all, we still have the followers of Pegasus and his good vibrations , a haunted choir trying to save or change the world. They are speeding up, the cult leader is slowly not feeling well, the end is coming! This delightful group will be tiny in the sixth volume, especially compared to the previous one, in which they took up a lot of boards.
You may consider the next paragraph as a spoiler, but it seems to me that the further development of events is predictable. You already know Punpun and its author, even if the latter has cheated us a bit in the previous volumes. There is nothing really good here
Punpun and Aiko take the girl’s mother’s car and flee the city. We see them at gas stations and in shops with everything, such an affair with Żabka. And I must warn you again, it will be tough. The atmosphere was not the best from the very beginning, and all the shortcomings and suppressed emotions, mainly bad ones, emerge from the main character, because (in his own opinion) as an absolutely bad person, he can only do that. The boundaries of the possible have been shifted and nothing can be as it used to be. As you can imagine, this is not a Bonnie and Clyde madness journey. More like a common pathology of mutual self-destruction to which we are unfortunately used to. Yet Asano fills the frames with Aiko’s smiles, emphasizing the artificiality of her relationship with Onodera and the stubborn desire to feel freedom and use it.fan service from the previous volume.
sad tango
Volumes five and six are key to Goodnight, Punpuna ; it is in them that the essence of the thought experiment that Asano practices in this manga is realized. Mangaka wanted to understand what drives people to do evil. Seemingly completely ordinary people, who sometimes experience happiness, although much more often more and less annoyance. And at the same time, like Punpun, they are naive, as if they are too hard-headed to deal with betrayals or lies on the part of others. After all, crime is ultimately the product of what Marek Zychla calls “mercy”.
Is Onodera, an unhappy, too quiet kid, a dramatically lonely adult, and finally a criminal, a mystery? Or maybe his “accident” is just another boring, predictable error in the operation of society with its basic cell, which can be very unsuccessful? And will it all be over on July 7? For now, it seems to me that the last volume will not change much in my reading Goodnight , because the world of Punpun is a downward slope from which you can only fall.
