tl;dr: A manga with a really good central relationship and mystery told with good tone and atmosphere, that although pretty different from the anime is just as good and very much worth reading as well. 

This is a manga for which I’ve already seen the anime for. Contrary to what I expected, the anime despite only being 13 episodes long and being released before the ending of the manga actually adapts the entirety of the manga more or less. However, it does it in a pretty interesting way that I find it hard not to talk about. Both the anime and manga show the slowly developing romance between Yuuko and Teiichi incredibly well with it being really easy to get heavily invested in their relationship. Both also show a solid amount of character development in both of those two and make Yuuko incredibly likable, and also do a decent enough job with side characters. Both are centered around an interesting mystery that’s well told. Both manage their tone and atmosphere with a good blend of horror and comedy incredibly well. And both build up to very satisfying conclusions.

However, how both of them do each of those things is very different.  The anime has far less content than the manga, choosing to only adapt the key portions in quick succession, while the manga has a lot more surrounding those key moments. This leads to the anime having a lot of impactful moments that change things tremendously and lead to a lot of suspense for the viewer, while the manga has a much slower build up that slowly draws the reader in, both with the core relationship and the core mystery.  The pacing is completely different, but each works well for its medium. This also results in the side characters being mostly glossed over in the anime in favor of focusing on the main relationship which definitely worked to the anime’s benefit, while in the manga the side characters get a decent amount of focus which works much better with the manga’s pacing. The tone and atmosphere in the anime rely on both the very fitting art and music, while in the manga it obviously relies on only the art, however the manga does things with the art that the anime wouldn’t be able to do, at least without the crazy stuff Shaft sometimes pulls.

But what most stood out for me was the ending. As the anime ended before the manga, the ending to the anime was essentially original, though as the core of both endings is pretty much the same I suppose the author told them how it would end. Or rather, a better way to put it would be that for the most part the ending is the same, but what led to the ending is completely different. Without going into spoiler territory, the buildup to the ending in the anime relies heavily on a sequence involving an insert song that is tremendously impactful. The manga on the other hand doesn’t have anything like this sequence, instead focusing on something completely different that doesn’t happen in the anime at all. The way it’s done in the manga, while close, isn’t as impactful as how it happened in the manga, but how it was handled in the manga wouldn’t have really worked in the manga at all. However, the manga manages to give a decent length and very satisfying epilogue, while the anime has one that’s like more of a side story focusing solely on being amusing over any substance due to it being a separately sold OVA. Both endings were handled incredibly differently, but I came out of both thinking they were incredibly well done, as I thought regarding the works overall.