I Want To Be Killed by a Highschool Girl

I Want To Be Killed by a Highschool Girl is yet another Usamaru Furuya's manga that I've read in the past month. I think I read most of his stuff by now. I find his work really interesting because he never planned to be a mangaka until he was 26. He still has a background as an artist, he majored in oil painting but being a mangaka never interested him until he actually did it, and you can see it in his earlier works. His earlier works are what I love the most because they're so strange compared to the rest of the stuff you'd see around. I love the humor mixed with ero-guro stuff, never thought I'd have such taste before. The first manga of his that I read was 51 Ways to Save Her and I actually didn't know he was behind it when I read it. That manga had a cohesive linear plot and one set of characters, rather than just being a gag manga like his earlier works. Sometime after that I read his earlier works Short Cuts and Palepoli which became my favourites, and I still didn't know that he was behind 51 Ways to Save Her! Just shows how different the subject matter and the vibe was. Even though, looking back, the art style is pretty recogniseable.

I Want To Be Killed by a Highschool Girl is one of Furuya's newer stuff and I have to say the premise was really interesting, I read it under an hour. The manga is about a dude called Haruto, that has Autoassassinophilia which is basically a fetish for being killed by somebody. He of course, wants to be killed by a pretty high school girl. And there's one girl he set his sights on, so much so that he swapped his major in university to become that girl's high school teacher, and he also left his gf for this reason (or so we think). Oh and his gf is on her way to become a psychologist. I'm spoiling shit big time from this point on so if you're interested in reading, I recommend you don't read from here on! The girl Haruto is into is called Maho and she has dissociative identity disorder due to a traumatic childhood. Her best friend Aoi has autism, but she's also the only person that's aware of Maho's split personality who she's actually friends with. Maho helps Aoi with understanding social cues, but Aoi is also the only person she can feel safe around because she knows about her DID. They have a cute dynamic going on. Yukio is a boy that has a crush on Maho, he likes her so much he got into the same prestigious high school despite being kind of a dumbass. The story starts when Haruto's ex-gf Satsuki shows up at the high school as a counselor. She slowly starts to unravel that Maho is in love with Haruto, that Aoi doesn't feel safe around Haruto and she thinks he's trouble, that Maho has DID and that Yukio is in love with Maho and wants to help her. In the meantime Haruto is orchestrating his big plan of his murder-day that will happen on his 35th birthday, he quits his job, gets rid of all of his belongings, and plans on how to get Maho alone in order to have her split personality murder him. Anyway, it turns out Satsuki knew about all of this and she came to that high school in order to put an end to it. Basically all of them help Maho get over her DID and "merge" the personalities and they also get a tracking app on Maho's phone in case Haruto gets to her. Which he does of course, and she accepts his invitiation to go to the woods as she still has a crush on him (and doesn't know he's a degen, only Satsuki and Yukio do). Anyway in the end they manage to prevent Haruto from getting himself killed, Yukio and Maho end up together, and Satsuki ends up with Haruto while trying to undo that fetish of his. He is, however, still a degen and now he's looking into hypnotisation in order to bring back Maho's old split personality.

So what's the point of the story? That degenereates will always be degenerates? Hehe.. Well either way the main thing I wanted to talk about was Satsuki. She is such an ironic and tragic character, and I'm not sure if she was purposefully written that way or not but this hit hard. She embodies the "I can change him" mindset a lot of women tend to have and suffer for it. And the last big irony is how she is able to perceive things well and read people masterfully yet she cannot see this fatal flaw in herself. She wasn't able to help Haruto in the end, because it turns out he's just a plain old sociopath. One super weird thing I have to point out was the monologue Satsuki had when she was confronting Haruto during the climax, she tells him how Maho had a crush on him and how if he wasn't such a crazy person, they could've ended up together. It took me by surprise but also not really because I noticed before Japan (or maybe just anime/manga, idk) has this weird obsession with teacher/student relationships, not in a taboo way, but in a "this is totally normal and respectful" way. God I can't remember which anime it was that just glossed over such an event. In DeDeDe at least it was treated as someting weird and unusual, and also as a gag. Anyway, Haruto literally spent a portion of his life stalking Maho and planning his life around her in order to get killed by her at a certain age, how could you tell this man that he could've been her husband??? It should be the last thing to say in such a situation, Jesus.

All in all I enjoyed the manga, especially for the Satsuki/Maho/Aoi interactions which I thought were endearing. I don't think it's perfect and the end felt like it came all of a sudden with a large timeskip but it's worth giving it a read, it's quite suspensful at parts. Also here's a pic of Haruto playing Shadow of the Colossus, my favourite game.