Goodnight Punpun Omnibus, Vol. 3

Goodnight Punpun Omnibus #3

by Inio Asano

Meet Punpun Punyama. He's an average kid in an average town. He wants to win a Nobel Prize and save the world. He wants to go far away with his true love. He wants to find some porn. But Punpun's life is about to unravel...

Genres: Manga, Comics, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Coming Of Age, Slice Of Life, Drama

440 pages, Paperback

First published September 20, 2016

About the author

Inio Asano (浅野いにお, Asano Inio) is a Japanese cartoonist. He is known for his character-driven stories and his detailed art-style, making him one of the most influential manga author of his generation.
Asano was born in 1980 and produced his first amateur comics as a teenager. His professional debut happened in 2000 in the pages of the magazine Big Comic Spirits. Since then, he has collaborated with most of the major Japanese magazines of seinen manga (comics for a mature audience). Among Asano's internationally acclaimed works are: the psychological horror Nijigahara Holograph (2003-2005); the drama Solanin (2005-2006); the existentialistic slice-of-life Goodnight Punpun (2007-2013); the erotic A Girl on the Shore (2009-2013); the sci-fi Dead Dead Demon's Dededede Destruction (2014-2022).

Reviews

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

I. SWEAR. TO. GOD.
This story is going to be the death of me. It’s getting darker and more depressing by the volume and this one is just 100% misery and despair. It also hits home really hard. What a masterpiece. I’m so in love.

[Babs · Rating 4 out of 5]

My god, where to begin? Emotional horror? Psychological trauma?? Punpun is truly lost at home, at school and adrift in the world. An encounter with his uncle's girlfriend causes a change in himself, with drastic repercussions. Punpun's mother lurches from one awful episode to another, and we see what really happened in that domestic incident....
This was a pretty challenging read!

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far, these books have everything I look for in fiction. There is raw reality. Asano doesn’t shy away from anything, nor does he hold back on how fuzzy the ball of guilt, shame, anger, and restlessness can be. Everything about the pacing of this story has been fantastic, right down to the time skips and the moments where Asano chooses to zoom in on a few seconds, blowing it up into several pages instead of a single panel. 4 more volumes to go.

[daph pink ♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I decided to pick up this series again after putting it on hold for about nine months because I can't stop thinking about it. Every now and then, it comes to mind. People frequently comment about how this series devastated their emotions, however in my situation, that is not true. These three books have been quite dry for me and have had little effect on me.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I completely forgot how emotionally wrecking this manga is. Asano is a f*cing genius, that's what he is.

But at least the fake fan letters at the end of the volume gave me a good laugh. "My favourite character is Sasuke!"

[Internet · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series feels like an open wound. Simultaneously compelling and repulsive reading.

[Plagued by Visions · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story at this point, although containing those poignant moments which make it easy to see why it has been relegated to the status of a classic, nonetheless starts to feel like a one-trick pony. There’s A LOT that’s visually dazzling, compelling, and of course, that signature Inio Asano mix of endearing and disturbing. Yet, the story here starts to feel a bit taxing, just a constant, angry indictment on humanity, which seems to lack anything particularly new to say except constant, garrulous wails (however entertaining and gripping they might be).
Yet, I will keep reading, because there’s something strangely intriguing and gripping about the entire thing, and because it promises to hit unprecedented highs (or in this case, lows) in its future installments. To me, it is morbid curiosity, above all else, really, that this story devotes itself to keep stimulating.

[richa ⋆.˚★ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will be discontinuing this series because my mental health matters more.

[Phu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Những điều tồi tệ đang đến, nhưng rõ ràng câu chuyện vẫn đang tiến triển tốt.
Bối cảnh Punpun trở thành một học sinh cấp ba, giờ đây cuộc sống của cậu ấy cũng dần có những thay đổi. Trong Vol.3 này mình hoàn toàn thất vọng bởi Yuuchi, đúng là cuộc sống đầy cám dỗ; mình càng thất vọng với những gì Midori đã làm. Nhân vật được bọc lộ khá nhiều lần này là Người mẹ của Punpun - nội tâm của bà phức tạp. Dĩ nhiên một nhân vật có nội tâm phức tạp là Punpun, cuộc sống của cậu bé đầy hỗn độn, chuyện tình cảm và tình dục mãi chẳng về đâu.



Cặp đôi mình yêu thích Seki và Shizumi vẫn đang có sự phát triển. Những suy nghĩ của Seki về tự do, hay cách cậu ta nhận ra những hành động bồng bột kia rất tuyệt.

[Angie Ospino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solo sé que estoy amando cada vez más este manga.

[Whitney Jamimah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dang. The plot thickens.

This arc follows Mama Onodera more than anything and she’s the most messed up of all the Onoderas to date. Still, poor Punpun, he’s just destined for a hard time. I am so attached to these characters. I am eager and scared as crap at the same time to go on to the next volume.

[Amani · Rating 5 out of 5]

another emotional train wreck 😭

[Rahul · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 Stars

I guess being depressed on and off and sad for such a long period in my life that I kind of forgot true happiness. That's why I think I keep searching these kind of depressing stuff.

But there are two different kind of depressing stuff, one which are superficial which most of the popular fiction contains and the other pain and suffering of everyday mundane living which only and only a gem like this manga could hold and reflect. So many times in this manga I could find myself in the characters facing the same chaos. The characters are so real and there lives more or less like us.

Looking forward to Volume 4.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one quite writes ordinary despair like Inio Asano, from the horrible fulfillment of Punpun's sexual urges to the culmination of his relationship with his mother. It isn't depressing per se, but it isn't easy reading either.

Also, I'm beginning to think that Punpun is supposed to look phallic rather than birdlike.

Full review eventually appearing on ANN.

[Aurora Dimitre · Rating 5 out of 5]

In all seriousness, this is my favorite manga. It has been my favorite manga since I was about thirteen years old. I am still in love with Seki, I still think the art style is phenomenal, and man, this series is dark in all the right ways. Still great. Love having physical copies of the series instead of reading fan translations on my 2010 iPod touch.

[Kesa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to struggle with depression and anxiety throughout my life .. I still am. But this manga .. I don't seem to grasp it. Especially this volume I didn't like it as much as the first two omnibuses. Will keep on reading it though.

[Dylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series is so depressing

[akacya ❦ · Rating 4 out of 5]

2025 reads: 208/300

content warnings (some spoil): sexual assault of a minor, child abuse, death of parent, medical content, depression, OCD

we continue punpun’s story as he navigates high school and his relationships with his mom, peers, and self. this volume definitely followed the trend of getting darker as the series goes on. punpun experiences something early on that, understandably, rocks him to his core. he grows more detached from reality, which was unfortunate to see since high school could have been his fresh start. whereas last volume went more in-depth into punpun’s uncle, this one did so with his mom. she was…something. i don’t know how to describe her. i think part of her really did want to be a better mother, but she clearly had no idea how. i’m thinking we’ll get more information on punpun’s dad next volume. i’ll be reading it soon to find out!

[Morgan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay, this was it for me. I'm all done with this series. I dislike all the characters and can't relate to or sympathize with any of them. The relationships (romantic, sexual, or otherwise) are flawed and toxic and not in an understandable way. This honestly feels like something written for edgy teenagers at this point. I probably wouldn't dislike it so strongly if these volumes hadn't leaned so heavily towards teenagers being with adults in one way or the other (again, romantic, sexual, and otherwise). Yada yada ages of consent are murky in Japan, yada yada teens can be mature too, whatever. It's gross and the amount of times these younger/older person relationships have been featured in this series squicks me out. It's time for me to say goodnight to Goodnight Punpun.

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is the part of the story where I really start to identify with and help, the feelings.

[Nightwing’s Thiccness · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Punpun was just the slightest bit rattled”
After reading that volume, ya me too bruh.

[milena enevoada · Rating 5 out of 5]

meu deus, eu chorei tanto

[sums · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still deciding between 3.75 and 4 stars. Review to come.

[randa · Rating 3 out of 5]

"what a sinner really needs isn't punishment. it's to understand the pain of being forgiven."

[Izabela Noga · Rating 4 out of 5]

[4.5] Już nie możemy zawrócić...

[Alexis U · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. What a rollercoaster of emotion. I finished this yesterday and Punpun always leaves me a big ball of sad. I feel a combination of "this series is too fucking brilliant" and "it's not that deep, man, pipe the fuck down."

I've never felt so conflicted over literally every character in a book. It's so funny to me that characters are illustrated as caricatures of people but with every page they become more and more multifaceted. I do appreciate that recurring side characters always show up with the same posture, the same cartoonish expressions, which makes them much easier to identify as they grow older. I really love this series so far.

[Ana · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars *may change
why is his uncle a pedophile.

[Any · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tô ficando assustada com esse enredo. E sempre senti que esse tio do Punpun tinha algo sombrio a esconder... 😓

[Nikola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yuichi eres un mal bicho 😡😡

[Paul Spence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Punpun’s Rite of Passage (Chapters 47-56)

Poor Punpun! After getting into high school, an achievement that was “just the inevitable outcome of relentlessly studying,” Punpun realizes that he isn’t excited. “His memories of the last two years were nothing but equations and English grammar,” and the distillation of all this mentation was an intense desire and only one thought, “to have sex,” which Punpun goes on to express in a “deliberately vulgar” manner that we’ll delicately refrain from repeating here. During this time, the horrors that happen around him—-a student arsonist arrested, a pregnant student’s month-long absence for an abortion, and the disappearance of uncle Yuichi after being caught in adultery—barely register. Without an object for his desires, Punpun feels hollow, and his junior high graduation isn’t moving in the slightest.

He arrives at Midori’s coffee house with a vacant stare, which Midori assumes means that he’s a good listener, but we the readers know is the outcome of unanswered lustfulness. Misreading the painfully withdrawn teen’s quietness as emotional availability, Midori begins to unburden herself. At first, this unburdening is only emotional, as after a long denial, she begins to accept her fiance’s unfaithfulness as she helps to pack Yuichi’s things to send to his grandmother’s. Mama Onodera is selling the house to pay off the $200,000 judgment against Yuichi incurred by causing emotional distress to the man who was married to Yuichi’s new girlfriend.

Later, the unburdening takes a dark turn, as Midori, the twenty-five year old woman who would have been Punpun’s aunt, relieves her sexual needs by seducing the fourteen year old boy. The scene is harshly hewn: Midori moves through tears of grief and the abandonment of her self-respect as she begs him twice “just a little bit,” and while Punpun’s desires remain ambiguously masked by his bird-face, creator Isio Asano brings parts of him into stark realism to convey his shock and frightful stillness as he loses his virginity. Asano captures Midori’s mingled emotions, both nausea at her moral weakness, and the euphoria at giving her needs and passions agency through making Punpun a proxy for her lost love, Yuichi.

Afterwards, Midori gives Punpun his graduation present and says that she loves him, and he walks home, at first unwilling to put what just happened into words, because “If he uttered even a single word, Punpun felt like he’d lose too many important things. That they’d just disappear. So he kept quiet.” But during the long walk, Punpun gushes that “in that instant, Punpun had felt like he understood all the secrets of mankind,” and from this epiphany he descends into a sordid description of the release of fluids. After he opens Midori’s gift to find a pair of reading glasses, he admits that he is romanticizing what happened, and it was base and pointless: “Or that was what was supposed to happen. But instead, Punpun’s head was empty. Just like the sky after a typhoon.”
In an interesting B arc that postpones the final beats of Punpun’s sexual awakening, Masumi and Shimizu have parallel rites of passage of their own.

When Masumi’s family is in desperate need of money to avoid eviction, he finds an ad sheet mounted on a pole that reads “will do anything for money,” scratches out the previous contact information, and writes in his own. Not long after, he meets the first caller in a cafe, and she turns out to be both a good paying customer, offering him more money than he needs, and hell in a handbasket. She tells him to kill her cheating ex-fiance, and he takes the rolled bills without questioning his ability to follow through. However, when Masumi is standing behind the adulterer at the train station, and ready to shove him in front of the oncoming train, he finds that he doesn’t have what it takes to be a killer. And though she didn’t know him by name, and he could have just taken her money, he returns to the cafe, tells her that he couldn’t do it, and that she should try to make herself happy rather than making other people miserable. When the failed murderess throws water in the failed hit-man’s face, the reader might feel that Masumi was extremely lucky that she only chose a glass of water as her means of retaliation.

Concurrent to this, Shimizu lands an odd job as well, but when he discovers that it is to clean out the stink and filth from a recently deceased man’s apartment, he runs away and meets Toshiki aka Pegasus, an extremely important character according to Inio Asano, who tries to recruit Shimizu to his cause. Pegasus explains to Shimizu that the universe will be destroyed in five years unless he is able to assemble a team of “chosen people” with “good vibrations.” Shimizu gives Pegasus his usual deer in the headlights look, but this time the reader may feel that it is warranted.

After these interludes, high school begins for Punpun, and Punpun still feels “out of place,” and has a “heart…full of unbelonging.” He goes on, thinking “Hurry! If someone didn’t embrace him soon all his cells would turn into bubbles and burst. Also, if it wasn’t too much to ask, he would be ever so grateful if someone would let him stick it in, just the tip.” As if the capricious god of Goodnight Punpun answered this sudden prayer, a girl named Kanie approaches him and introduces herself. The two hit it off, and in their walk through the streets, we see Pegasus and his chosen people prolonging the life of the universe with their cosmic harmonies. But Kanie and Punpun are oblivious to this sidebar, and the reader may be wondering what is going on with Pegasus as well.

Punpun’s coming of age has an awkward conclusion. Mama tells him his grandfather has died, and before he can come to grips with this, he learns that Yuichi has come home, having married Midori. To make matters worse, he hears the news from Midori, who says that Yuichi returned the day after Punpun and Midori had their encounter. Because Yuichi is depressed and in therapy, Midori made a half-joking vow to “keep him in the palm of my hand until he dies,” and she hints to Punpun that “I’m really happy right now. So you understand, right?”

Punpun’s reaction is to feel “how great it would feel to rip out her clitoris and her pubic hair and throw it all in a ditch,” but he says “congratulations” instead.

While walking with Mama, Punpun is sullen and uncommunicative. Mama reads this as narcissism and attitude, but Punpun is tortured by Midori’s exploitation of him, the death of his grandfather, and the end of his childhood. She berates him for his wordlessness, and when he starts to cry, she continues to tear into him for playing the victim, and tells him not to come home that night.
It’s an extremely dark arc, and I refer to it as Punpun’s rite of passage in all seriousness, as Punpun wrestles with his sexual desires and comes away feeling less human. Because far from giving you the secret of humanity, or even giving you a single moment of belongingness, Punpun discovers that sex without understanding is alienating. In their sidebars, Masumi and Shimizu discover that the pursuit of money conceals a different kind of depravity in themselves. These kinds of adolescent desires—to dream, as a teenager does, to fulfill oneself with sex or money—are likened by Inio Asano in this arc to be one with criminal impulses. Of the three, only Punpun has an epiphany about this—that these adolescent desires never leave you, and that it is his adult inheritance. Furthermore, he inherited it from his mother, an adulteress who has sex so loud that Punpun can hear it, who apparently does not grieve the death of her father, and who kicks her crying son out of the house because she wants to have a boyfriend over.

“Why are grown-ups so selfish?” Punpun thought. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to run at full speed past the train station, stark naked, chanting black magic spells? No, no, can’t have such dangerous thoughts. It’s his fault…The world is probably overflowing with kindness and happiness. Maybe something good will happen tomorrow?”

Goodbye Mama Onodera (Chapters 57-67)

The next half of Goodnight Punpun, originally volume 6 in the Japanese release schedule, focuses on Mama Onodera, Punpun’s mother, and as this half deals not with the mystery of sex but the finality of death, it is much easier to recap: Mama survives a failed suicide attempt which reveals a hole in her lung, only to die from an aggressive cancer nine chapters later.
The suicide attempt is the fallout of her night of male companionship at the end of the previous arc. Having put Punpun out of the house to wander the streets, she takes this opportunity to rut with her married boyfriend all over the apartment, after which she begs him to marry her. When he says no, she goes to the kitchen and gets a knife. After threatening to cut herself, she works herself up into a tearful tirade, and then collapses. At the hospital, Mama learns that she has a pulmonary pneumothorax, or a hole in her lung.

Much of the 180 pages after Mama’s suicide attempt take place at the hospital, where she explores her infatuation with an attentive boy the same age as Punpun. Ironically, she is sharing a hospital room with the boy’s girlfriend, and he does not know this because he has been unable to visit the girl due to feeling guilty about being to blame for their bicycle accident. Not only does she tell the boy to go to her, she also attempts to soothe the despondent young girl, but it turns into unwanted commiseration when the selfless girl wishes her well after her surgery the following day. Despite speaking the right words to both kids, Mama decides to pursue her wrong feelings for the boy, and buys candy for a gift, only to discover that the young couple left the hospital.

This quirky arc is a nice send-off for Mama; however, because the insight that she gains as a result changes nothing, transforming not even her own life, her gain of self-knowledge is not a moral gift from a benign universe, which you would expect in more traditional fiction. Goodnight Punpun’s god is personal to Punpun, and does not speak to Mama. This is one of many indicators that Goodnight Punpun is a deliberately skewed, postmodern, and unbalanced narrative. Neither the author, nor Punpun, nor even dying Mama, try to find meaning in her death, but instead watch through their bird’s eye masks as death happens, and then life moves on, whether we’ve managed to find meaning in the death or not. Punpun remains withdrawn while visiting Mama’s deathbed, and while she initially says that she “doesn’t love him a bit either,” while the two bird eyed masks gaze upon each other, one in the throes of death and the other at the beginning of his adult life, she confesses that she loves him very much. Afterwards, the author reveals that “Punpun didnt love his mother, even at the very end.”

Inio Asano could have been tempted by the significance of the fact that one of only three characters drawn in the surreal cartoon style—Punpun, Yuichi, and Mama—has died, and stretched the narrative to accomodate Mama’s death by having Punpun find the meaning in it, or even simply reciprocate his mother’s dying declaration of a maternal love that she never exhibited, but instead Asano was firmly resolute in letting it happen irrespective of meaning, just as it does in real life. Just as in real life, feelings (or in Punpun’s case, their absence) have no closure; they only fade in the shadow of other, newer, feelings that drown them out.

Goodnight Punpun Volume 3 is another excellent seinen manga from the Viz Signature series. While I sometimes feel that labels are dishonest, as most things that are labeled for “mature” audiences are anything but mature, and filled with gratuitously indulgent depictions of unsympathetic characters gratifying themselves like beasts until you become at best indifferent and at worst desensitized to the sex and violence depicted, the Viz Signature series applies the “Mature” label meaningfully, as Goodnight Punpun deserves this label for its truly mature depiction of carefully rendered characters. As if cut from life, these pen, ink, and paper beings make bad decisions seemingly of their own accord, so that the resultant suffering seems not only real, but cathartic.