The Spring 2024 Manga Guide

A Brief Moment of Ichika

What's It About? 

It's been three years since college student Ichika Sendawara was given two years to live, and she naturally feels like time is running out. But then, on the train, she happens to see her beloved teacher, Professor Yurugi, who had vanished suddenly at the end of the last semester.

That one glimpse stokes the fire of a passion she had more or less given up on…but they may have more in common than she ever suspected. The economy in storytelling in this first of three volumes only serves to underline the poignancy of their connection—is a brief flash of happiness worth the pain of separation?

— Life is fleeting, and love all the more so.

A Brief Moment of Ichika has a story and art by Natsu Tadano. Gwen Clayton translated this volume. Published by ‎ Vertical Comics (April 23, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

“Sick lit” is one of the more enduring trends across young adult fiction and its close cousin, new adult. It's a genre of fiction that follows someone with an incurable disease, and at its worst (often exemplified by the works of Lurlene McDaniel), it revels in the hopelessness of a young person with an incurable disease trying to find a little bit of happiness. A Brief Moment of Ichika treads dangerously close to that line, although I wouldn't say that it crosses it; both Ichika and her beloved Professor Yurugi are terminally ill and struggling with it, and Ichika isn't going to let either of them give up without attempting to be happy together.

It probably helps that she's had more time to live with her unnamed disease. She was told three years before the story begins that she had two years to live, and while I wouldn't say that she's comfortable with that, she's certainly used to the idea. Yurugi, on the other hand, only recently learned of his diagnosis, and since Ichika's not sharing hers with him, he's afraid that dating him will ruin her life and set her up for heartbreak. She wears him down, though, and the story focuses on dating while she hides her condition – until, of course, she can't anymore.

The biggest issue for some readers is going to be that Yurugi was, before his diagnosis, Ichika's teacher. That he no longer is doesn't necessarily matter, and he does make a real attempt to act like he's older and better aware of life's pitfalls than she is. That's part of what Ichika likes about him, but it's still a little uncomfortable, especially since we don't get any of his thoughts until the final chapter of the book. On the other hand, it's relatively rare to get this entirely from Ichika's perspective, which helps cut down on the inspiration porn angle; she's the narrator and main character of her own story, so we're seeing what he does for her rather than risking her being an inspirational element in his story. Despite that, this simply feels bland for a story that desperately wants to be emotionally resonant. Admittedly, Sick Lit isn't my favorite genre, but this still falls short of what it's attempting, at least in this first volume.

I enjoy being bummed out as much as anybody else. An effectively toned tragedy can be precisely the mood piece I'm looking for sometimes. It can elicit some emotion or prompt some reflection afterward—and what is the most distilled purpose of human art if not to make us feel? A Brief Moment of Ichika is pretty clear about its aim to jerk tears from the beginning. Past that, I appreciate its initial focus on the titular terminally ill Ichika and telling the story through her eyes. Too many tragedies of this ilk frame the sick love interest from the point of view of a less lifespan-challenged paramour, which can result in the sadness-porn elements feeling more like exploitation. From Ichika's viewpoint, her looming literal deadline comes across matter-of-factly; it's a circumstance she can't let herself pay much mind to, excusing it to herself as she does under the pretense that she's too dumb to worry about it.

It's in those meandering moments of melancholy that A Brief Moment of Ichika excels. The vibes of the story are on point even as the details, perhaps by necessity, get messy. It's maybe easier than in other cases to rationalize the issues in Ichika's crush being her former teacher Professor Yurugi. For one, in the present of the story, he's not her teacher anymore. He taught her in college and is comparatively young himself. However, the story deviously trades out that typical taboo for more personal problems. After I remarked on the exploitative idea of terminally ill love interests in stories like this, it turns out that Yurugi is living on borrowed time as much as Ichika. Instead of using this detail to springboard into a perhaps inspiring tale of mutual support, the writing uses Ichika's inherent disregarding of her own condition to paint her as, arguably unintentionally, manipulating her crush. Your tolerance for how "fair" this is will be directly proportional to how accepting you are of this kind of real-person messiness, and almost certainly colored by any of your own experiences.

For my part, even as there were times when the writing felt a bit like it was stalling with all this beating around the emotional bush, I mostly found A Brief Moment of Ichika compelling in its characters' questionable decisions. This is a story that inquires about the obligations people have to spend what brief time, whatever moments they have left, as effectively as possible. It's an introduction to ending lives that hones in on acknowledging that a future, however short, is still there. Natsu Tadano's occasionally structurally weird art communicates a vibe that's arguably awkward on purpose to complement the lack of clean, calculated story beats. A Brief Moment of Ichika is one of those stories that isn't going to work for everyone, and I can see it downright infuriating some people. But in between its initial imperfections, I felt I got a peek at something fascinatingly more than the sum of its momentary parts.