Punpun - Oyasumi Punpun
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Punpun, a silent embodiment of ordinary despair in Oyasumi Punpun.
Punpun is a quiet, dreamy child growing up in a harsh, ordinary Japan. He experiences violence in diffuse ways: shouting, silence, departures. His mother is hospitalized after a suicide attempt. His father disappears. He has no role model. No shoulder to lean on. And yet he keeps going, alone, observing the world with big bird eyes. Because visually, Punpun doesn’t have a human face. He’s drawn as an abstract figure. This visual strangeness makes him a universal mirror.
He loves Aiko. That strange, radiant, unstable girl. Together, they run away. Aiko kills her mother. Punpun hides the body. They live in a tent. Until the day Aiko commits suicide. He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t cry. He just stays there, covered in her blood. Then he gets up. He walks. He crosses the city without looking. He no longer speaks. He no longer hopes. He’s still alive, but everything that made him feel has vanished.
What makes Punpun so tragic is that he never turns violent. He doesn’t become dangerous. He doesn’t go mad. He becomes invisible. And in this slow extinction of vitality, in this refusal to cry for help, he embodies a disturbing truth: those who sink in silence. Those who ask for nothing, because they expect nothing.
Oyasumi Punpun is not a redemption story. It’s a story of painful lucidity. Punpun is the specter of an anxious, passive, exhausted generation. He has no powers, no enemies, no salvation. He is the product of a world that forgets. And in that awful simplicity, he becomes one of the most poignant characters in modern manga.
Punpun never screams. And that silence is what hurts. He is proof that you can keep walking long after you've collapsed. He is the hollow heart of a world that’s too loud.