Onani Master Kurosawa

A guilty pleasure if I ever saw one. Expecting the worst, morbid curiosity first prompted me to check out Onani Master Kurosawa. The premise revolves around the titular protagonist Kurosawa’s penchant for jacking off, especially inside a particular girl’s bathroom at his school. A female classmate, Kitahara, ends up discovering his habit, and she blackmails him into becoming her agent for revenge. (The “revenge” basically consists of forcing poor Kurosawa to cum on her oppressor’s various belongings.) Angst aplenty ensues over the course of four volumes.

What I thought would be a “so-bad-it’s-entertaining” exploitationist tale turned out to be a decently entertaining ride, despite the fact that there was even more jacking off than I could have anticipated. I’ll be frank, this series has a lot of clear weaknesses. Pacing is rather off. There are quite a few leaps to be made in terms of emotional and plot logic. The manga/anime referencing wasn’t the slightest bit funny. (Is it ever?) Art is iffy. But the sheer honesty that Onani Master offers does help in partially making up for some of these weaknesses. At its heart, you get a story about a pent-up, lonely teenager who’s damn frustrated about his relationship prospects, and seems to have only one friend in his right hand. Which one of us males hasn’t gone through this? Another thing that works in this series’ favor is that the author, Ise Katsura, keeps dilly-dallying to a minimum. He doesn’t shy away from getting to critical character moments, and he doesn’t drag things out. If anything, some developments were too sudden.

Anyhow, far different from what I was expecting, which, for once, is a good thing. It ain’t spectacular, and tilts on the forgettable side, but if you’re really bored and would like to see the topic of Man’s favorite pastime in a somewhat more fleshed-out manner, good God pun not intended, you can’t go too wrong with this piece of work.