After reading a review that compared Deep Love to a car wreck, that alone was enough to spike my interest. It was on the last page that I realized why it was like a car wreck. At the end you’re left there frozen in your tracks staring, at nothing, long after the car and everyone else is gone. Unable to form any coherent thoughts just a dumbstruck expression on your face.

That’s what Ayu’s life was, a huge accident, one you see coming long before it hits you, yet you’re there staring at it getting closer because you are so stunned by its complexity. Wondering, trying to pinpoint the exact point in time in the story her life spiraled out of control and coming out blank because there are so many you wouldn’t even know where to start or end.

Who was Ayu? A lost girl, who believed love was pointless. Living alone, selling her body for money not because she needed it, but because she felt insignificant. All that mattered to her was getting money, in her life that‘s what made the world go round. Not knowing that there was more to existing than just breathing and looking out only for yourself. Life has something new in store for Ayu and it comes in the form of an old lady’s kindness.

The word love gets thrown around everywhere in manga (in my share of read ones anyway) . In this case it’s not the romantic type of love, it’s the other kind. The type that’s so rare, yet a lot of us have it but take it for granted, not giving it a second thought. Not until we lose it. I was more surprised at myself, that I enjoyed Ayu’s story so much, even though it is the story of a girls sorrowful life and not a romantic comedy. It’s Ayu picking herself up just to be slammed to the ground again by an invisible force. The choices she makes to change her life, ones she regrets and ones she would do all over again.

This isn’t the type of story you laugh through, actually there are only smiles and heartwarmings, no LOL moments. If you want to laugh or feel all warm and fussy this is far from it. It’s a cruel life where the decisions you make will catch up to you, and I think that’s where this mangaka got it right. Life is unfair and sometimes will give you very few reasons to smile and though you might feel closed up and trapped, like Ayu, there is always someone who cares.

The art was a little on the plain side, but that same art showed me a cover that dared me to read it, a girl crying, for a second I thought I saw wrong. Let me be the first to point out that when a manga first words are, “Care to give me a blow,” it is bound to have some ecchiness. Guaranteed even. Though graphic in context at times it never shows any nudity, not in the completely naked anyway. It’s about her story, uncensored.

When all is said and done, though I agree with the car wreck, for me it was more like getting punched in the face and you don’t know who did it. In the end you’re left angry and stupefied at realistically sad story of a girl named Ayu.

That being said this is the best quote that sums up what this manga is about:

“Appreciation is the purest, and strongest form of love. It is the outward-bound kind of love that ask for nothing and gives everything. It is the antidote to fear. Although fear was the first feeling that developed during evolution, love is believed to be the second.”