Saltiness

Saltiness ran in Weekly Young Magazine from 2012 to 2013, four volumes long. The lead is a manga artist who has stopped working, stopped washing, and mostly stopped leaving his apartment. A teenage girl with her own wreckage moves in, and the two of them orbit each other in a space that keeps getting dirtier. Furuya draws ordinary squalor with unusual care: the piled trash, the stained futon, the slack faces of people who have given up on the day. It is grim, sometimes funny, and never pretends a hug will fix anything. The English edition is unofficial, so getting it legally means importing the Japanese or French volumes.