"Your life is your life"
Reiji Kurose has had a hard life. His mother is torn between looking after his senile grandmother and NEET older brother; he's being bullied by his former childhood friend; and worst yet he feels listless and anxious in his small countryside town. While he figures he can get by living like that, everything changes once he meets his favorite idol, Nagi Aoe — and she offers him a way out in death.
Shounen no Abyss, also known as Boy's Abyss, is an ongoing manga written by Ryo Minenami (previously known for Hatsukoi Zombie and Himegoto - Juukyuusai no Seifuku). The manga currently runs in Weekly Young Jump, and has been there since 2020. The series was picked up for an English release by Viz Media.
The series announced a live action adaptation in 2022.
Boy's Abyss provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Very few parents in the series are all that great to their children. Reiji's childhood was contaminated with a physically abusive father and he's been manipulated and groomed (along with his brother) into a passive and dependent young man by his mother for his whole life; Chako's parents don't care for her beyond her good academic standing with her father hitting her after her date with Reiji gets found out; and even Yuko and Esemori had rotten childhoods thanks to their parents.
- Adults Are Useless: Practically every adult in Reiji's life is worse than useless. They're actively harmful and toxic towards Reiji. The parents of the other kids aren't much better; Chako's father washes his hands of her and her mother goes along with whatever he says, for example. The only exception is Shino’oka/Tokiwa, who was able to get Chako out of committing suicide, convincing her that she can choose how her story goes and does not need to rely on Reiji or Esemori.
- All Love Is Unrequited: Eventually, Sakuko, Shibasawa, and Gen are revealed to be in love with Reiji, but the latter only has eyes for Nagi, whose feelings on anything are a mystery. Played with in Sakuko's case, as she only developed feelings for Reiji after she hit her personal Despair Event Horizon and admits as much to him. In Yuko's case, Gen's father had a big crush on her, but while he gets to have sex with her in the present Yuko has never felt an ounce of love for the guy; and to be fair, he isn't enamored by her either, but stays around her out of self-imposed duty to the late Uryuu.
- Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: Chako eventually tries to sleep with Reiji in an act of desperation, feeling like his unwillingness to have sex with her compared to Nagi and Shibasawa meant that he didn't look at her as a woman. Reiji explains that he considers her special because she hasn't had sex with him yet, but also warns her that he'll stop giving her special treatment the moment they do.
- Attempted Rape: Gen has a problem with Chako— he recognizes that she's becoming like the toxic and manipulative women of the town, and now desires to marry Reiji to keep him tied down to her. The former does not take this plan well, but his solution to the problem is to attempt to steal Chako away first before she can ever win Reiji over. Said 'stealing' is an aggressive attempt to rape her, which is only stopped when Reiji catches them struggling.
- The Baby Trap: Yuko's ultimate manipulation of Shibasawa boils down to this. If Reiji wants to leave town, then the only way he'll possibly stay is making him feel like he has duty and a family. Yuko tells Shibasawa to coerce Reiji into impregnating her.
- Barefoot Suicide: Several times both Reiji and Nagi are barefooted on the bridge talking about committing suicide together and almost do.
- Be Careful What You Wish For:
- Thoroughly disappointed and disgusted by Ms. Shibasawa's behavior, Reiji tells her that he would like "Ms. Shibasawa" the teacher back instead of "Yuri" the lover. She answers this request by going to Chako's school and reporting her attempt to come onto Reiji to them, under the guise of a good teacher protecting her student.
- Sakuko's father never wanted her to go outside of town, constantly rejecting her even when she had the academic prospects to back her up. After the incident with Reiji, she has finally given up leaving town, but now she's not going anywhere; her school reputation wasn't totally tarnished, but she's developed a nasty eating disorder and she's become a Hikikomori.
- "Begone" Bribe: Shibasawa manages to swindle her grandfather out of over ten million yen, adding that to her current expenses just so she can bribe Yuko into giving her Reiji. Shibasawa intended for her to use the money to put her aging mother and Kazumasa in institutions while Yuko leaves town entirely, while Shibasawa claims to put Reiji in separate housing and finish his studies there. Yuko recognizes that the teacher's intentions are anything but pure, so she holds off on the arrangement.
- Breaking Speech: The kids give each other one when they finally go to Tokyo. Gen calls out Chako for trying to insert herself into business she shouldn't be worried about to satisfy her need to feel special, and calls her a boring extra; Reiji tells Gen that he never asked Gen for his protection and that what he does to "help" Reiji doesn't take into account what he really wants, dismissing his love for him as projecting a love of Yuko onto him along the way.
- Calling the Old Man Out:
- After listening to Esomori's backstory, discovering a chunk of the dark secrets Esomori and Yuko had been hiding, and learning why Esomori met Nagi and decided to come back to the town, Reiji condemns the man and chastises him for misunderstanding the young Yuko and using the events of the series as writing fuel. The reason why this would fall under this trope and not a "Reason You Suck" Speech is because at this point, Esomori is revealed to not be his father but his influence and presence make Reiji consider him his spiritual father instead.
- Reiji is also able to take his grandmother to task after she shuns him for supposedly being an incest baby. Without losing his polite speech patterns, he tells his grandmother that she could have found plenty of other ways to pay off the family debts rather than pimping out Yuko, and then tells her to follow the dying Yuko into the afterlife.
- Later on, Reiji snaps when he believes that his mother is having a bittersweet Dying Dream hallucinating Akira Nozoe reading Spring's' Coffin. He grabs onto her and lays into her for dying so pleasantly when she's ignoring the plethora of awful circumstances she's done to others and left for Reiji to deal with, as well as her own suffering in the past.
- Domestic Abuse:
- Yuko's family life is colored by domestic abuse, both in her youth and as an adult. Her mother sometimes had bruises on her arms from her father, and Yuko sometimes got caught in one of his drunken rages as well. Meanwhile, Yuko herself had a marriage that eventually crumbled into beatings.
- Chako's mother is implied to be suffering from this, as her father slaps her when he learns Chako snuck off with Reiji and the only reason she doesn't go after Chako when she escapes to Tokyo is because she's afraid the father will hit her again when he learns the truth.
- Dramatic Irony: One of the reasons why Yuko's brother tells her to stay at home and not follow him to Tokyo was because she, as a girl, would be much more vulnerable to strangers and unable to survive on her own, while she still has a known community at home (despite her father's domestic abuse). He probably couldn't have known this at the time, but staying home did more damage to her psychologically and physically than leaving with him, as she was prostituted as a teen by her parents and for her community, along with indoctrination by her great grandmother telling her she should never leave home.
- Driven to Suicide: Almost every character in the series has thought of this or attempted this over circumstances in their life that gives them a seemingly hopeless future. An in-universe novel that gets minor focus, Spring's Coffin, concerns two lovers' double suicide due to the village not approving of their relationship.
- Dysfunction Junction: None of the named characters in the town can be considered well-adjusted or truly happy with their current lives. Many are deeply troubled individuals that mask their feelings as they go about their day.
- Elemental Motifs: Water. The town's biggest attraction is a river that acts as the set piece for an infamous town suicide and the backdrop of Esomori's most famous book; rain is a constant presence in the story; and more than once water relates to the animal imagery of fish, best associated with Nagi, Reiji, and those on the volume covers.
- Extreme Doormat: Nagi and Reiji are both this. They're both unsure of what they want in life, and generally only follow what their peers expect of them. While we still don't know what's made Nagi this way, we do know Reiji was deliberately raised to be subservient and listless.
- Foreshadowing: In Chako's rant to Esomori, she explains that she hated one avenue of his female characters—that at their core, all they want to do is be "stained" by someone. She further elaborates that she feels girls fear rejection more than any "staining", and that it would hurt harder. This more or less explains Yuko's motivations when her backstory is revealed: she's used sex to get her way and has been forced into sex by her parents, but while she was upset by this, what truly broke her was Esomori leaving and eventually hating her. Her treatment of Reiji stems from using him as a substitute.
- Generation Xerox: A lot of Esomori and Yuko's backstories are mirrored in Reiji's. Like Esomori, he has a chubby glasses wearing female friend who wants to support him, doesn't have a good relationship with his schoolmates, got bullied on the regular, and was a withdrawn, passive boy. Like Yuko, his older brother doesn't have a good relationship with his parents and isolated himself, his mother is always working, and his father was abusive.
- By the late game, the whole story looks to be an intentional recreation of Yuko and Esomori's adolescence. A Minegishi was possessive of Yuko and violently protective of her; a bookish, plain looking girl with comparatively milder circumstances served as Esomori's other love interest; Esomori's reactions to Yuko are parallel to Reiji's for Nagi.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Yuko’s father/Reiji’s grandfather/Reiji’s father can be this, considering he was not only involved in abusing Yuko, but (at least according to Yuko's mother) he was also involved in conceiving Reiji. Reiji’s conception led to Yuko going through a lot more suffering than before. And despite no longer being alive, his abuse played a role in how the family became dysfunctional. So he’s the cause of all the drama among the family.
- Growing Up Sucks: Though the children aren't happy either, becoming an adult in the soul-sucking nowhere town is shown to be a borderline Fate Worse than Death. Miss Shibasawa deeply resents her career and prospects. Esemori and Yuko go from good-natured and kind children (with horrible home lives) to become cruel and manipulative adults. Chako announcing that she would remain in the town and grow into an adult is a result of giving up all aspirations for a better life and resigning herself to a life of misery that others have inflicted upon her. As a child, Esemori even proposed that Yuko kill herself with him, as he felt it would be a better fate than living on and becoming an adult himself.
- Honor Thy Parent: Filial piety isn't exactly praised in this setting. In fact, anyone offering to stay in the town and help take care of their family is portrayed as a person who gave up on their dreams and "matured" into yet another lifeless adult. For specific examples:
- Reiji is essentially the man of the house, sharing responsibility for caring for his grandmother and caring for his mother when she gets injured. As he grows as a person, he eventually realizes sides to her he dislikes, but he cannot fully break the chains of devotion to her even when he learns of her backstory and how litle she regards him as an independent person.
- Yuko, as revealed in the flashbacks, has no love for her parents because of their treatment of her, but she felt she couldn't abandon them and reluctantly accepted the prostitution they forced her into so she can work off her father's debts. She still cares for her mother in old age with Reiji's help. On the other end, she spent Reiji's developing years grooming him into passivity and instilling a desire to protect her.
- Incest Subtext: Yuko is never actively incestuous to Reiji, but as we slowly learn over the course of the series, her obsession with him can rival a lover's sometimes. Everything she's done up to this point was part of a twisted desire to keep him in the town with her, and she fully intended on dying together with him akin to a lover's suicide. She gets pissed off when Reiji calls out for Nagi before he stabs himself, and Esomori pretty much confirms that she was using Reiji as a substitute for himself when he couldn't die with her as teens. Lampshaded by Reiji's grandmother, who spitefully tells Reiji that she thinks he and Yuko have slept together after seeing the latter come into the former's futon a number of times.
- Jerkass Has a Point: What makes Shibasawa so effective as a toxic influence is the fact that she's right about a lot of the things she says to Reiji. She agrees with the notion that he needs to get out and away from the town, that Reiji thinks too little of his entire living situation, and that he needs help. However, she thinks that all can be fixed if he simply stays by her and never pursues other girls. Post time-skip, Shibasawa also jumps at the opportunity to give Kosaku Esomori/Akira Nozoe "The Reason You Suck" Speech when she finally meets him on his deathbed. Specifically, Shibasawa calls Esomori out on how Spring's Coffin and the suicidal atmosphere of the book's contents sickens her, that he and Yuko ought to be ashamed for dragging Reiji and Nagi respectively into their trauma, and that the two should resolve their lingering problems together whether it be making up or a lovers' suicide while leaving everybody else out of their bullshit.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In Chapter 45, we see Shibasawa for the first time since Reiji got hospitalized and she arrested for running over Yuko. Rather than disheartened or broken or incarcerated at all, she's rather happy and planning her next steps in her apartment. The panel where she's first seen in full after so long is even positioned as if she was speaking to the reader, smugly asking "Did you think I was in jail?".
- Living Emotional Crutch: Played for Drama. Everybody in the story uses someone else as this, but nobody is better off for it. Reiji has expectations put upon him by his mother, Yuri, Gen, and even Chako for various reasons, but he feels used and unseen for this, eventually realizing how much everyone relies on him emotionally. He also unknowingly does this to Nagi; As Esomori puts it, Reiji never asked Nagi what was troubling her, and only came to her when he was in need of comfort.
- The Loins Sleep Tonight: After Reiji reunites with Sakuko, the latter asks the former to have sex with her and comes onto him in a moment of desperation. Reiji, however, cannot get erect, and after multiple tries proves to her that he's not making it up. His current depression has everything to do with it.
- Love Makes You Crazy: Ms. Shibasawa goes from a mild mannered teacher who feels the mild need to get married, to a full blown toxic manipulator who wants to keep Reiji for herself and "save" him from his depressing life after they have sex for the first time.
- Love Triangle: Reiji's childhood friend Chako likes him and wants to leave their hometown together. Reiji likes her back and also wants to go together to a university in Tokyo. While his homeroom teacher/girlfriend Ms. Shibasawa falls for him hard enough to get Yandere over him, stalking him and refusing to accept his break-up attempt with her. Meanwhile, he dismisses them both for his infatuation with Nagi.
- Men Use Violence, Women Use Communication: A dark example. Multiple times the series shows the toxic influence of men on the lives of the characters, particularly physically, but the people that end up doing the most harm are always the women. Most girls try to control their peers with manipulative words or appealing to their better sides to get what they want since they lack the power to chase after it themselves, or at least feel trapped enough that they can't. Meanwhile, most town men use some form of violence to keep people in line or to accomplish goals, such as Yuko and Reiji's fathers abusing their families or Gen pushing Reiji around. Deconstructed, though, in that violence and communication very rarely get them what they want or need, rather than what they think they want in the present time. Everyone is still miserable.
- The Promised Land: For the ever stumbling youth of the town, Tokyo is presented as a rich city where anyone will get the chance to pursue their dreams or one giant step into the outside world. Sakuko wanted to go to a prestigious college in Tokyo, Kazumasa originally was studying to go get an apartment somewhere in there, and Reiji's had some desire to explore it. Reiji, Sakuko, and Gen eventually get there, but it's the least important part of their development by the time this happens.
- Red String of Fate: One cover has Nagi and Reiji connected to one.
- Rule of Symbolism: When Reiji goes over to Nagi to confess all of his anxieties, he is framed in shadow. It's meant to invoke his confessional game with Chako, where both wear cloth over their faces so they can safely confess their worries. As Reiji took off his cloth and left before he could ever tell Chako anything, his obscurity here shows that he feels safer talking to Nagi about things.
- Small Town, Big Hell: The manga takes place in a small countryside town, but it is a dreary, soul sucking place. The residents don't take kindly to outsiders and bully them relentlessly, their biggest tourist attraction is a river where two lovers committed suicide together, and it seems like everyone is up in each other's business, as they are wary of the main character because of his mother's promiscuous background and abusive father. Everyone stuck there wants to either leave or make the most of their situation, but they get by on doing this by developing toxic, codependent relationships with each other.
- Small Town Boredom: The story loves to play with the idea that the town itself is a soul-sucking place. There is very little to enjoy there besides a convenience store and one tourist attraction, the population is aging, and the youth is either unmotivated or trying their hardest to get out of town when they have the opportunity.
- Social Services Does Not Exist: There is no one to really turn to in their town. Reiji at first couldn't get any help dealing with his toxic household, his abusive father had to be run off by the local gang rather than the authorities (or at least that's what Yuko tells him), and other signs of domestic abuse, like Shibasawa's financial and emotional hold on him and Chako's father's abuse of her mother, go quietly past the rest of the town. And let's not get into the underage prostitution, also perpetuated by a kid's parents... Downplayed later on, as some forms of social services are shown later, such as the elder care nurses for Reiji's grandmother and physical therapists for Yuko following her getting hit by Shibasawa's car.
- Stay in the Kitchen: Applied to a lot of the town women. Moving out and heading for the city is often discouraged for girls, often using sexual assault in the city and cautionary tales about girls who left and crashed hard to dissuade their desires to leave. Even other girls do this, as Chako's mother and Yuko's great-grandmother can attest, leaving Generational Trauma and making their children perpetuate the cycle of suppressing their children. In fact, the only girl who willingly left only did so because her husband's job required him to move.
- Teacher/Student Romance: Shibasawa, at first, struck up a sexual relationship with Reiji that was only to last until he graduated high school. As she grows more obsessed with him we see that she really does crave his affection, but justifies it with her martyr complex.
- Temporal Theme Naming: A lot of the characters have names based on either the time of day or a sky phenomenon. This includes Reiji (midnight), Esomori/Akira (daytime), Sakuko (new moon), and Yuko (night).
- Til Murder Do Us Part: Yuko reveals this was the true circumstances regarding her husband's death. While he was a genuinely abusive jerk at the time and constantly hurt Yuko and Reiji, Yuko herself manipulated Gen into killing the husband and Gen's father into disposing of the body. The only reason this happens is because she lashed out at Kazumasa's desire to leave town.
- Took a Level in Jerkass: Post time-skip, Chako has fully degraded into yet another toxic manipulator obsessed with keeping Reiji to herself so she can die in a lover's suicide with him akin to the tragic heroines of Esomori's books. But when Reiji doesn't follow through thanks to Gen's intervention, compounded by the announcement of a live-action adaptation of Esomori's best selling novel with Nagi Aoe in the star role, Chako flips out and marches towards the nearest tabloid office she can find to expose Nagi's marriage to Esomori and hit the latter with a False Rape Accusation using the selfie she took with him while he was unconscious. This inevitably causes a shitstorm of a controversy that torches Esomori's reputation while he's on his deathbed and capsizes Nagi's career as an Idol Singer due to the affair violating her contract, which leaves pornography as a JAV Actress Nagi's only real business prospect moving forward.
- Toxic Friend Influence: A weird inversion. As multiple people point out, both Reiji and his mother have genuinely toxic personalities; however, one is more passive-aggressive about it while the other simply absorbs the lessons he's been taught by his peers. However, both of them are treated as "abysses"—while they don't actively do harm to whoever they come into contact with, their attitudes somehow attract others and threaten those enthralled to sink deeper to their rock-bottom emotional level. It's up to the affected to either fall in or resist temptation.
- Victim-Blaming: Gen tries to guilt Reiji into staying in town by naming him as the root cause for his mother's prostitution.
- Wham Line: When Rei's older brother makes his first present-day onscreen appearance, his immediate response to Yuko coming home is to beg her to allow him to use the bathroom on his own. This immediately implies that his Manchild outbursts in the earlier chapters weren't him being a spoiled older brother— he was instructed to be so by Yuko, for whatever reason.
- Wham Shot: Gen has one when he's shown in his room — it's filled with all the cigarette boxes he forces Reiji to buy for him, and he cradles the latest one affectionately, hinting that his behavior towards Reiji is much more than a friend turned bully.
- Whole Episode Flashback: Chapters 49 and 50 focus on Esomori's adolescence, and how he came to fall in love with Yuko. Later on, a whole volume is devoted to the same backstory, explaining in full detail why those two had a falling out and the depths of what Esomori considers his sins.
- Yandere:
- Ms. Shibasawa slowly becomes a rare analytical version. When she becomes obsessed, she stalks her student/sex friend Reiji Kurose, constantly tries to persuade him to leave his family and friends behind so he can live with her. However, she knows that her behavior will come off as inappropriate, so her attempts to isolate Reiji include taking official means and convincing others to rid of her perceived threats to their 'relationship'. When he attempted to break up with her, she invited his mother to a parent teacher-conference in an attempt to separate them by having him agree to go to an outside university. Shibasawa also destroyed Chako's last ticket out of town by informing her school of her attempted sex attempt on Rei, which kicks Chako out of the student council program she needed to qualify for a prestigious university and demolishes her teacher's recommendation for said school. Even Shibasawa's bold and blatantly suspect move of attempting to buy Reiji outright from his mother for ten million yen, comes with the caveat that the mother must use some of the money to find a facility or shelter for Reiji's grandmother and older brother respectively as well as move out of their original home. This plot ensures that whatever family ties or concerns keeping Reiji bound to the town are safely severed, leaving herself as the only person in his life he can lean on.
- A seemingly non-romantic example is Gen, Reiji's childhood friend, when he learns that Nagi tried to have a double suicide with Reiji but was Interrupted Suicide. He threatened her, telling her to stay away from him and to leave. Gen told her that he won't allow Reiji to leave, not even by dying and that Reiji was his. He keeps a pile of cigarette packs in his bedroom when he forces Reiji to buy for him every morning. As it turns out, he does have feelings for Reiji after all—but these feelings are a mixture of guilt for killing Reiji's father, a need to protect Reiji in the only way he knows how, and a supposed interest in Yuko that he projects onto Reiji instead.
- Reiji's own mom is a more subdued, but obsessive variant. At Yuko's core is a need to feel accepted and for her loved ones to never leave her, even if either party has to suffer for it to happen (and more often than not she's deliberately instigating the suffering). She doesn't mind getting hurt along the way if she has someone there for her to struggle with her. Currently, she projects this need onto Reiji, and while she shows less favor to Kazumasa and forced him to throw tantrums she still loved him enough to not want him to leave.
- Yakuza: It's heavily implied that the town has a community of gangsters beneath the surface. Gen's father owns a construction company, which in real life is seen as a common front for yakuza, and he is the one who helped bury Mr. Kurose. It's also implied that the people who Yuko's father was indebted to are yakuza, which is outright confirmed when a flashback shows that one of the clients Yuko was forced to have sex with had gangster tattoos along his arms.
