Tokkaten

Tokkaten is something I stumbled upon by incident, and at that time I had a very busy schedule and just wanted to have something that you can just read over over a cup of herb tea, and Tokkaten was just it.

It features a number Hanazawa-sensei's earliest works, a bunch of oneshots featuring different teens in separate stories that take place chronologically one year apart; and while the stories are fairly slice-of-life, he would later go on to create works like 'Ressentiment' and you can definitely see that in these: his unique take on things like bullying and young-adult relationships, and while it's nothing deep - it's really interesting.

I felt that the art was moderately basic (it WAS his early work), very Hanazawa-sensei-eesh. And for me, that gave the stories a childlike lightheartedness to them. The stories are anything *but* childlike: there's lots of lewdness, subtle black humour, and a bit cynicism - but still, it IS a bunch of stories about young adults and the stories themselves are like those things that you did once during your school years that no one remembers about, and don't really affect you after all these time.

With all these said - the characters are unmemorable, random people doing seemingly random things: but that adds more to the story; overall I enjoyed that tea-break. Would recommend it if you like weird things and looking to pass a quick time, and especially if you're a Hanazawa-sensei fan.