May 22, 2025
Jumbo Max' art style and Breaking Bad-esque premise are undoubtedly compelling in the beginning, but in terms of writing this is one of the less interesting works by Takahashi.
Tateo Sone is pharmacist, recently married and struggling with impotence. One day, his wife tell him he got her pregnant in a night of drunken passion Tateo has no memory of. In the meanwhile, Tateo starts working on a new, much stronger formula for erectile dysfunction pills that ends up killing people due to its functionality.
At first, you're inclined to empathize with Tateo's naive behavior. After 60 chapters, the guy is a complete and annoying idiot
...
who repeats a mantra over and over again. It does feel like hearing Luffy saying he wants to become king of pirates: Tateo wants to help people feel sexually happy again. His ingenuity gets exhausting after a short time. It's as sweet as it is underdeveloped really. Tateo's humanity feels artificial, he is driven by onedimensional wishes that he always expresses with single sentences ('they need to pay for what they've done' belongs to this trope as well), so sympathizing with him is never a complex matter: it's like seeing a puppy saving a kitten. It's tender, yeah, but that's pretty much it. For the same reason, his vengeful arc never appears genuine but rather a tool to give the narrative a bit more spice.
Pretty much everyone else is a financial shark who wants to earn money or prestige on poor bastards' life. There's barely motivations beyond this.
In general the writing of the characters is very onedimensional, the focus is entirely on the fast-moving plot and its large ensemble of characters that exist to make it go forward.
There's some characters that diverge from this and I feel Takahashi is preparing some new arcs and plot twists for them, that to me feel uninteresting as the characters are not compelling enough.
Talking about the plot, I don't think there's anything bad in 'taking inspiration' from a western story, after all western cinema and literature took inspiration from several japanese products. It almost touches plagiarism at times, as the premise is REALLY close to the Breaking Bad one (an inherently good man who takes a dangerous and criminal path for altruistic reasons) and some elements are straight up identical (dude works on a damn camper).
The thing evolves the way you'd expect: people try to blame everything on poor Tateo, who gets more vengeful because of them, while a smart police guy is investigating the whole thing and getting extremely close to arresting our lead and everyone involved.
The structure itself is pretty redundant and this scheme repeats itself over the course of the 62 chapters I've read - after those, I wasn't interested in going on with it.
Unlike Jiraishin, whose heart were the complex human emotions in display, sacrificing an overaching plot for the sake of creating interesting dynamiques, this works the opposite way. It's a more 'pop' work in a way, meant to appeal to a broader audience with its thriller and fast paced plot, but overall heartless to me. It appears uninterested in making its characters really develop over the surface.
I have no idea why he dropped Neun, it was a much more unconventional story to keep on writing about.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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