Review:
Suzume is a beautiful, smart, and kind high school girl who everyone loves. She's friends with this manga's narrator, a boy called Aa-chan, and one day she confesses that she likes him and asks if she could be his girlfriend. Aa-chan, who views himself as pathetic and utterly unlikeable, turns her down, saying that she's too perfect for a guy like him. He assumes that she'll get over this rejection and find someone more worthy of her, but then she goes missing, and he starts to wonder whether his rejection of her might have contributed to her disappearance.
A month after her disappearance, Aa-chan comes across a large caterpillar who speaks with Suzume's voice. Now that she's so pitiful and nasty, she says, can she be his girlfriend? Although he still won't let Suzume be his girlfriend, she doesn't blame him for what she's become, and Aa-chan hates himself even more. He takes her home with him to keep her safe, find out what happened to her, and hopefully undo it.
I was not expecting this to be so dark and complex. It looked at mental health and the effect that toxic parental relationships can have on kids. I'm still not sure how I feel about the ending, beyond saying that this definitely isn't one of those works where mental health issues are easily fixed and hand-waved away.
I do wish that this manga had spent more time looking at Suzume and what was going through her head. Honestly, even prior to the events that resulted in her becoming a monster caterpillar, she didn't seem entirely healthy to me - her focus on Aa-chan was fairly obsessive. We got to learn how and why Aa-chan came to hate himself so much, but why did Suzume make Aa-chan the center of her world the way she did?
And that ending... Was it a good ending? I don't know. But it's definitely one I'll be thinking about for a while.
I liked the artwork and found Caterpillar Suzume to be very creepy-cute.
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