Cigarette Girl

Let me preface this with saying that I actually really like slice-of-life anime and manga. For the majority of the time that I was reading this work, I didn't really enjoy it too much? That's not to say that I didn't like it though; for me it just felt like something that was sat there in front of me, as opposed to something that I would actually actively try to engage with. I thought the art style was interesting, although I feel like an area that this work falls short in is that there's a few characters that look either the same or very similar? For instance, the main boy who shows up at the beginning and end, looks exactly like the kid with the mom that left their family. I think the confusion was amplified for me because the initial first boy hadn't shown up in a while, and when the kid came back (with the only difference pretty much being freckles) I had to go back to the beginning to check and make sure it was a different person. I think most of my confusion mainly stems from the art style making the characters not very memorable (for me at least). I am fully aware though that this might just be a me problem.

As for the narrative; for most of the time I was reading, I didn't really get the point of it? It just seemed like a lot of extra miscellaneous events happened, and then the end hit. By the end though I realized that it was about how the man and woman at the beginning were close (? I think?) and everyone in the story was looking for marriage, and by the end, the two at the beginning end up being together in some form. Which I think is sweet and fine, but I only really came to that conclusion by the end of the work, which means that the rest of the reading experience was just me passively reading it and waiting for something to happen that I would care about. To some extent, this did happen a little earlier on when the one woman who was pregnant fell. That was very sad and tragic. But besides that though I didn't really feel anything towards this work for the most part. It was alright.