Inside Mari (ぼくは麻理のなか) is a psychological romances/slice of life manga by Oshimi Shuzo. The manga was published between 2012 and 2016.
Hikkikomori Komori Isao finds himself in a spiral of self destruction. His life has stopped and his future is uncertain. The only bright spark in his life is a beautiful high school girl who works at the convenience store near his house. He decides to follow her one evening after her shift, unsure of what he is going to do. As he struggles internally with what he's doing she turns around to confront him. The next thing Komori knows is that he wakes up in the body of the girl, Yoshizaki Mari.
Komori has to deal with suddenly residing in the body of the high school girl he has been obsessing over, dealing with suddenly being female. He also has to fake being Mari around her family and in school, both of which he has absolutely no clue about. On top of the stressful situation of having to pretend to be this high school girl he has to face the idea of how he happened to replace her, what happened to his body and where is the real Mari? The only one who realizes something is truly wrong is a classmate Kakiguchi Yori, who has watched Mari from the sidelines for a while now, sorting through her own feelings and personal issues.
I wasn't sure what to expect out of this manga. I started reading it after I had watched the anime version of Flowers of Evil, which is a manga by the same author. While there is a super natural aspect to the story it really focuses on the main characters coming to terms with their own personalities and the search for the truth of how and why Komori suddenly took over Mari's body. In the beginning the focus was on him coming to terms with suddenly having to live a different life, as the opposite gender. The situations of dealing with being a woman, being around other women casually in intimate situations and dealing with things such as menstruation. It shifts to digging into the hidden secrets of Mari's family and the emotional attachment of her classmate Yori. If memory serves correct the author may be undergoing gender reassignment and in some ways this could have been a way of working through that.
The artwork is pretty decent through out. There are many panels where the backgrounds are rather barren, forcing you to focus on the character and their dialogue, which works well. Oshimi has a really good touch when it comes to character expressions. This was a good read, not as stressful as Flowers of Evil, but like that one changes course half way through. Over all the real goal is to figure out what happened and how to fix it, along the way the main character goes through a self discovery as well as understanding things from a different perspective. The way the series ends though is slightly confusing and may leave a bad taste in some readers mouths. If you end up liking/do like this manga I might recommend Asatte no Houkou as well.
The series was published electronically by Crunchyroll though there is no word on a hardcopy release.
Hikkikomori Komori Isao finds himself in a spiral of self destruction. His life has stopped and his future is uncertain. The only bright spark in his life is a beautiful high school girl who works at the convenience store near his house. He decides to follow her one evening after her shift, unsure of what he is going to do. As he struggles internally with what he's doing she turns around to confront him. The next thing Komori knows is that he wakes up in the body of the girl, Yoshizaki Mari.
Komori has to deal with suddenly residing in the body of the high school girl he has been obsessing over, dealing with suddenly being female. He also has to fake being Mari around her family and in school, both of which he has absolutely no clue about. On top of the stressful situation of having to pretend to be this high school girl he has to face the idea of how he happened to replace her, what happened to his body and where is the real Mari? The only one who realizes something is truly wrong is a classmate Kakiguchi Yori, who has watched Mari from the sidelines for a while now, sorting through her own feelings and personal issues.
I wasn't sure what to expect out of this manga. I started reading it after I had watched the anime version of Flowers of Evil, which is a manga by the same author. While there is a super natural aspect to the story it really focuses on the main characters coming to terms with their own personalities and the search for the truth of how and why Komori suddenly took over Mari's body. In the beginning the focus was on him coming to terms with suddenly having to live a different life, as the opposite gender. The situations of dealing with being a woman, being around other women casually in intimate situations and dealing with things such as menstruation. It shifts to digging into the hidden secrets of Mari's family and the emotional attachment of her classmate Yori. If memory serves correct the author may be undergoing gender reassignment and in some ways this could have been a way of working through that.
The artwork is pretty decent through out. There are many panels where the backgrounds are rather barren, forcing you to focus on the character and their dialogue, which works well. Oshimi has a really good touch when it comes to character expressions. This was a good read, not as stressful as Flowers of Evil, but like that one changes course half way through. Over all the real goal is to figure out what happened and how to fix it, along the way the main character goes through a self discovery as well as understanding things from a different perspective. The way the series ends though is slightly confusing and may leave a bad taste in some readers mouths. If you end up liking/do like this manga I might recommend Asatte no Houkou as well.
The series was published electronically by Crunchyroll though there is no word on a hardcopy release.
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