Friends Until the End!

Every once in a while, you come across a series that ends up defying your expectations to how it will unfold based on how it starts. But all too often we readers have certain expectations for things because there is so much in this medium that gets told and retold with more or less variations on a theme.

From the very beginning, there was a certain expectation placed on Nettaigyo wa Yuki ni Kogareru that the author wanted to avoid so as to tell a different kind of story than one that you would expect at first glance. I for one appreciate that Nettaigyo is not like every other generic manga out there, and that the effort Makoto Hagino put in to tell a story inspired by Masuji Ibuse's "Salamander" short story is immense, with constant allusions, symbolism, and callbacks to earlier events to tie everything together.

Nettaigyo is far more than the sum of its parts, and tells a story more rich than what may appear on the surface without delving into the intricacies that Hagino wove through the story, and most of that cannot even be adequately appreciated without either re-reading it, or reading it all at once now that it's complete. Those are the things that make this series stand out from so many others, and even though it could have potentially been more popular had Hagino written a more conventional tale, as the old adage goes, "The candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long." The mark of a good series is not in its overall popularity, but how well it tells its story, and if Hagino is guilty of anything, it's telling a good story, so this is a series I will dearly miss.

And so, here is the final chapter of Nettaigyo wa Yuki ni Kogareru, a self-styled epilogue for the series to see these characters one last time. If you enjoy the series, please consider buying the official volumes from Viz if you haven't already, with the first six volumes out so far.

Nettaigyo wa Yuki ni Kogareru ch. 34: Mediafire, Drive