17-sai is based a true story that happened in Japan decades ago. However, when the reality was extremely shocking and violent, this manga only keeps the beginning, meaning the kidnapping of a 17-year old girl.

To quickly summarize the real life event : a group of thugs/delinquents kidnapped a high school girl after her part-time job, brought her to one of the guy's house, raped her, tortured her and eventually murdered her. In this fictionnal story, only the kidnapping & raping elements are kept. To clarifiy things up : no, there is not too much sexual violence (scenes are extremely censored) or physical violence (some characters get beaten up and one eventually finds death).

Here comes my first negative point : I expected a really dark story, giving me some chills making me afraid of human nature. 17-sai did not, or at least, I could read it without having many emotions. To give another example : Metamorphosis/Henshin/Emergence (same manga, different titles) also tells a very hard story, but it gave some real feelings / emotions. For some people, they cry and lie down in their bed, for some other, they unzipped their pants & start fapping or for readers like me, they stop their chapters with a very huge anger and only wish to beat the culprits up.

Sadly, I only felt a bit like "I'd like to do this stuff to these f$cking scumb$gs". It didn't break me or shock me, especially because the number of rape scenes was very low compared to the synopsis. This is obviously a very grave story and I wish it never happens to anyone in our world. If I were to use keywords, hum, disgusting, horrible, terrible should be the ones coming in first, naturally.

What I think was good about this manga, is that it gave a fictional story which could happen in real life. It clearly shows how human nature can variegate : from a regular high school boy looking for some adventure, to a disgusting person who cannot even look himself in a mirror. But eventually, what's terrible, is that none of the culprits in the story (it is not shown but supposed) have any regrets for what they have done. Evilness level is really high, scary on some points.

But 17-sai never truly scared me, as I could not be emotionally involved in the story (it has nothing to do with the fact the victim is a female while I'm a male). The author - in my opinion - fails to attract by force his reader, you only stay as a spectator of a story, instead of breaking the fictional wall and entering the story at 100%.

So my personal recommandation : if you are too sensitive, avoid this manga, it will only give you nightmare. If you are curious, it should be a "decent" introduction to a dark manga with rape thematic.