Masochist guy and a lot of love (or not)

When a really nice guy with a duo masochist personality is the LEAST screwed up person in the entire cast, you know that you are probably reading a Japanese book...

...which reminds me why I have read this book in the first place!


‘MM!’ by Akinari Matsuno is a Thai-translated Japanese light novel (a new genre of Japanese novels that targets teenagers and young adults by being dialogues-driven and containing comic-style illustrations) that I have picked up during the past holiday. The book is pretty much characters-driven, which is a good thing when you have a book filled with characters in need of psychiatrists. However, even though every character in the book is disturbed (to say at the very least), the book is mostly comical because it doesn’t deal with each mental issue seriously.

To sum things up, the book is a (somewhat) romance-comedy. It sets a love-triangle between a masochist guy and two women who often beat him up (for different reasons). The guy hasn’t set on a certain woman yet, but I have a hunch that he would end up with the megalomaniac lady.

I find this series to be quite entertaining even though I wish that the writer would have pushed the story to be even more extreme with his mentally-unstable characters. For a book that deals with incestuous behavior as a joke, the book is terribly PC (although that is probably the reason why this book can be published in Thailand since our government has a fetish for censoring and banning unconventional media). It is still a nice wacky read though, but it would have been a better book if only it is R-rated not PG-13.

For any Thai parent who happens to be reading this blog, don’t set on burning the book or the publisher. The book is not that unPC. Also, your kid can easily find more screw-up things to read out there.


-NOTE- This book has yet to be translated into English language nor has it been made into any other source of media (i.e. anime), so don’t kill yourself if you can’t find it in (non JP) Amazon.