“Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it'd lose even its imperfection.”

“Ten years ago. I was a college student at the time, and I had been kidnapped and imprisoned by U, a young girl in elementary school.”
(Such a lovely premise for an odd, peculiar, strange, yet, sweet and inspiring tale.)

NisiOisiN-sensei and another penned art of wonder – an obeisance. Needless to introduce. This novella, as bizarre as it is, is exquisitely enough interesting and charming, captivating in its own unique and intrinsic way. The story and narrative presents, and devotes, itself in the most dramatic and profound fashion, making the reader keep turning the page.
A 20-year-old student, an aspiring author, is kidnapped, knifepoint, by an abnormal middle school girl, U.U, and imprisoned for 6 days. And that’s it. Save, of course, all the quaint mystery encrypted, and the progressive unfold and unravelling story behind a little girl’s dark past. A mellow relationship between abductee and abductor; a strong and gentle will to comprehend and rescue a crumbling heart; an uncanny fish and a silent broken home; a solitude sovereign, and withal, the same abnormal and picturesque insufficient girl, U.U. With mild funny moments, thin thoughts and dialogues that seem to erupt out of an inhospitable prospect, still, a deepening drama, both psychological and tragic, is kept intact, alongside a sober and ascertained story shape.

Epic and grand, again, in its own unique and ethereal realm, named “imperfect” by an obsessed writer, obsessed, back then, with being a writer, this is a story within a story, retold and wrought, with deft art (subtle, but rigorous), by Mitsuru Hattori, with a shady human predicament. Complex interaction, symbiosis and behaviourism. Ambitious and desperate, perhaps an irony forged by fate, the storytelling of a genius, the accentuation about human adaptation (or, maybe, the absence of such), pain and courage. Idiosyncratic and graciously sad, an incident, a meeting plunged onto oblivion to try and reach into the heart of one another.