- Mangaka : Kuze, Gaku
- Publisher : Kodansha Comics
- Genre : Comedy
- Published : December 2020 - Ongoing
Uramichi is a 31-year old children’s TV host who leads physical exercises and teaches life lessons of how painful it is to be an adult. At the same time, he has to maintain his happy-go-lucky façade during his job. Of course, such a job doesn’t change his personalities for the best as he is miserable and upset with his current lifestyle. It is not just Uramichi; we have two mascots and a singing duo who are in a similar situation but have problems of their own.
Contains Spoilers
Discussion Time
Welcome to the next stage in life, and that is working in the industries and make a living for yourself. Have you ever been working in a job that makes you question your life’s decision and thought this is the biggest mistake of your life and sometimes history repeats? Of course, that might happen to most people in life because life can be a pain, and the past will always come to bite you in the butt. So score one for fate and destiny as they like to place all those hurdles and sufferings on us to test our will and determination.
Welcome to Life Lessons with Uramichi Oniisan! We are Uramichi, and we will teach you the struggles we have been through in life to your kids. Yes…your kids who have the time and place to relax and forget about the responsibilities of the adults to take care of society and the world and going through ridiculous procedures and dealing with uncooperative people where logic and common sense don’t exist.
Anyway, now that you get the idea of the manga, it centres around Uramichi and his colleagues, who are the unfortunate ones in life to showcase the dark humour of the manga. However, it is unique in the way that the facts the characters talked about are that they are so scary and the truth at the same time. You know what they say, truth does hurt. The story is done in a well-paced manner with short and meaningful chapters with different types of scenarios. The character designs are not too great but deliberately to bring out the dark humour further.
1. Painfully Realistic That Makes Us Laughs
You know it is a good joke or humour when they can be related to life, which concocted into dark comedy. This manga demonstrates the hardships the characters had to go through both inside and outside of their work. Financials, dream jobs and the deteriorating will and hope to live and yet resume their day-to-day basis.
The facts may seem harsh and daunting to some readers, but we humans have to learn how to see them objectively to understand how the world works and discover the solutions we can create and implement to fix these issues. Even if things don’t work out for us, we have to take a step back and assess the situation and keep going. To master something, you need to experience and learn mistakes, which many people don’t agree with that nowadays…
2. Characters
The characters’ experience and backstory are the main stars of this manga. Each of them faces their problems head-on while putting on a different persona to mask their real personalities during work, social interactions or anywhere that involves talking to people who are not their friends. You may be wondering why they have to do something like this, and the main reason is that if they don’t do as they told, they will be fired, cutting off their primary source of income and live in a financial burden life. That is where the chemistry comes in between characters where everyone provides company to each other to face the problems together. Maybe…
3. Short and Concise
Get ready to find a place for you to sit down and relax because there are 18 chapters in this one volume! Although the chapters are short, Gaku did an excellent job of getting the message across, and the story progression of individual chapters is natural for the character’s background story and development.
1. Dark Humor
This isn’t the kind of comedy that many people by enjoy it because of how it not only cheers readers up, but it can be thought of something negative, a reminder of readers’ unfortunate experience or making readers feel uncomfortable. So if you are looking for wholesome kind of comedy, you might not like this one.
Final Thoughts
Life Lessons with Uramichi Oniisan is a unique comedy manga series you don’t see it nowadays. It showcases many different relatable scenarios of how difficult it is to be an adult in a straightforward and well-executed manner. The story structures focus heavily on character development and backstories that complements the story progression. However, dark humour isn’t for everybody as it might give uncomfortable experience to the readers, but not too comfortable. Overall, if you like to read a comedy that contains truth bombs of how bad reality for an adult and be okay with it because that is how life goes, temporarily because all good and bad experience will eventually end, you would enjoy this manga series. If you do read this manga, let us know in the comment below of which character you are rooting for!
Author: Nobodies17
