Goodnight Punpun’s third volume begins and ends in resignation. Its front cover largely defines the drama to come: Punpun lost in a bustling crowd, just one (admittedly bird-like) face among many. In elementary school, Punpun marveled at the infinite wonder of the universe, thinking there might be a destined place for him out among the stars. In middle school, he grappled with a hyper-awareness of his own feelings, lost in the sordid anxiety of first self-consciousness. He was lonely, but he was distinct. Now he doesn’t feel like anyone at all.
As with volume two, this third era touches down some years beyond its predecessors’ drama, with Punpun now marveling at his lack of emotion upon completing middle school. It’s a fine structural tool for compartmentalizing Punpun’s drama into distinctive acts, but it’s also just the way of life. People speak of history moving fast or slow, of times when ten years pass in a blink, or a week takes a decade all by itself. Individual lives are much the same – our days seem precious and distinct when we are young, and they are precious, but not necessarily distinct. Sometimes, we wipe the dust from our eyes and realize years have passed us by, familiar routines ensuring our memories feel like merely a month spent idle, not an entire era lost in repetition.
Watching the tearful faces of his graduating middle school class, Punpun can only experience the joys and sorrows of this transition secondhand. His friends have drifted away, as young friends often do, as all friends do if left neglected. Like with so much else in Punpun, the drama of friendship dissolution is conveyed through the inevitable entropy of aging – not so much a “grand falling out” as simply not putting in the effort to hang out anymore, and at a certain point realizing you are strangers to each other. This is the cruel, common way of life; something new might always arrive, but if we want the old things we found precious to remain, we must not let them slip away like so many idle afternoons. Aiko watches from a distance. She doesn’t know him anymore.
Things do not improve for Punpun across this volume, I am sorry to say. He begins in a state of dissociative depression: “essentially and consistently, Punpun felt like he was hollow inside.” He knows he is unhappy, and understands that other people are not similarly depressed, but has no idea how he might claim the certainty and purpose that others seem to so naturally exhibit. He flails and rants and seeks sex wherever he might find it, but all the while the clock of his adolescence keeps ticking away. And Punpun is aware of this, too; reflecting back on this volume’s struggles, he thinks “being able to say ‘I was so young then, but those were good times’ seemed almost impossible.”
This might well be the essence of unhappy teenagerdom: not just being a teen, but being profoundly self-conscious of being a teenager, of having certain expectations of how you’re supposed to behave, what precious memories you’re supposed to be forging, and not exactly knowing how you’d do that, or even why you would want to. There is no satisfaction, no sense of thrilling deviance – just the lingering, growing certainty that you’re wasting an irreplaceable era of your life, an era that everyone around you says you should be enjoying to the fullest.
Of course, Punpun is not alone in feeling alone, or in failing to understand who he is supposed to be. The only thing that sets him apart is his age; as he reflects early on “if pretending to know everything was childish, and pretending not to know was mature, then I must still be a child.” Having experienced so little, he can at least cling to the hope that he’ll simply age through ignorance and insecurity, that if he keeps his head down and keeps doing what he’s supposed to, the world will eventually make sense. His only solace is not yet comprehending the fallibility of adults; unfortunately for him, every potential guardian he could cling to through this transition fails early and often.
Punpun’s uncle Yuichi provides this volume’s first example of alleged adulthood. Having found a girl who loves him in spite of his myriad failings, Yuichi proceeds to screw it up by sleeping with a married woman, incurring a debt that can only be paid through the sale of his sister’s home. And even then, he mostly just feels sorry for himself, reflecting that “I never thought getting sympathy from her would be so painful.” Having Punpun’s mother help only emphasizes his own wretched state, and how correct she apparently was in her allegedly simplistic, mundane approach to life and happiness. Life should be a majestic struggle for meaning, right? And yet, thoughts like that have only brought him here, empty and alone, still waiting for a train that will never arrive, staring bitterly at the passing faces of those who set themselves to pursuing emphatically ordinary happiness.
Yuichi’s reckoning is presented through a series of gentle, devastating panels of everyone who cares for him, everyone who was hurt by him and yet still managed to forgive him. His sister, his girlfriend, even the friend who won’t really talk to him. He wants to be destroyed for his transgressions, to be able to pay back his failures in suffering, but he is instead forgiven, and that’s what he can’t stand most of all. How is he supposed to bear the weight of his sins? How is he supposed to move forward, knowing he will continue to hurt the people he loves, and that worst of all they might continue to forgive him? “I hate myself because people are too kind” – if the world around him could offer some of the hatred he feels he deserves, he thinks he would at least feel a bit better. As is, he must conjure all the hatred he feels worthy of to aim at himself.
For her part, Midori is no happier than her errant lover. Though she goes through the motions of handling chores and her professional life, she ultimately feels just as empty as Punpun, wretched in her desperation for Yuichi’s return. Having achieved her dream of running her own cafe, she finds herself no happier than before. Confessing her anxieties to Punpun, she asks “What’s the one thing you believe in? The thing that, if you lose sight of it, you might lose yourself too. I finally get it now… for me, achieving my dream was just a checkpoint. I really loved… the four of us living together.” Single, tentpole achievements rarely provide lasting satisfaction. Contentment must not be a mountain you climb, but a practice you maintain – like living with people whose presence makes you whole. It’s a moment that would seem almost tender, perhaps even cathartic, if not for immediately segueing into Midori sexually assaulting her would-be nephew in search of that ephemeral closeness.
Catharsis is in short supply here. It is visible only in intangible fragments, a moment of Yuichi watching the sun rise over the bay, the fever dreams of Punpun’s increasingly medicated mother. “You don’t have to repay kindness immediately,” Yuichi’s taxi driver tells him. “You can pay it back slowly.” Can we turn time’s passage in our favor that way? Can our thoughtless accumulation of days actually enrich our lives and provide a sense of self-worth, rather than an assurance that we’re wasting a precious gift, that life was squandered on us? How can we live such that the days behind us are a comfort, not a source of anguish? Particularly when, as Midori demonstrates, even our dreams are ephemeral reflections of the circumstances that provoked them.
“Because you don’t know who you are, you create a god to cling to, and then heap all of your fears and responsibilities onto him… and somehow you survive. Is that being human?” In our fallen world, where the comforting fantasy of gods can no longer console us, it is a difficult thing indeed to believe you are following the right path, achieving your genuine purpose. But of course, if you don’t follow that path, you end up floundering in indecision and letting years float by, like so many of this story’s characters. And even if you do pursue your dream unerringly, you might end up like Midori, the achievement of her childhood ambitions now feeling empty without Yuichi beside her. So where does happiness truly lie?
What wisdom this volume can offer feels insignificant in the shadow of its anxieties. “Seek your own happiness.” “Pay back kindness over time.” “It is a beautiful day.” Such words of advice are, like happiness itself, entirely contextual. They are only transformative if we let them be – if they find us in a moment of crisis, or voiced by someone we have come to rely on. Like Punpun hearing “my narrow-mindedness makes me sad” from a classmate, the first time he’s recognized himself in another in years, a moment swiftly illuminated by a jubilant rooftop band. A fragment of grace and understanding, tucked between all the injustices and anxieties of living. These are the gems we live for – the moments we remember, after all else has passed.
Punpun, at least, still has time on his side. Having lost her home, her health, and any sort of relationship with her son, Mama Onodera can only offer a fatigued warning to the next generation, telling her hospital neighbor that “if you let time push you along, there will be so many things you’ll never be able to get back.” Alongside “sinners need to know the pain of being forgiven,” her words could well serve as a thesis for this unhappy volume. Trite words that can only be infused with meaning through experience, the certainty of loneliness, the inescapability of time’s passage; in the end, these things are truly all we have. Only on the verge of death can Punpun’s mother grasp what she was seeking, and what she abandoned in that pursuit. “I wasn’t trying to find myself. Maybe I was waiting for someone to find me.”
It is hard to find much hope in Punpun’s world; everyone here is selfish and unhappy, and the things they do to each other to redress those deficiencies are terrible indeed. Kindness exists only at the margins – but of course, as this volume persistently emphasizes, emotional salvation is really just a matter of the right words at the right time. “There it is,” Mama Punpun thinks to herself, having foolishly attempted to connect with her bunkmate. “She repaid my idiotic words with kind ones. I won’t want your sympathy! But… it’s nice.”
But it’s nice. We know our platitudes are meaningless and borderline insincere, but they are often all we have to share with each other. There are no meaningful, profound answers to life’s most important questions. There are only simple sentiments like “get well soon” and “have a nice day” and “take care of yourself,” things we say without meaning anything, things we say to fill the time between selfish pursuits and sober conclusions. And yet those words are everything – trite as they may seem, they encompass our quiet hopes of feeling slightly better tomorrow than we did today, of moving towards a place in life where our disappointments weigh a little less heavily upon us, of being the kind and considerate people we always scorn ourselves for failing to embody. Roll over and sleep, Punpun. Tomorrow is another day.
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