A gray morning, bird shit on the windshield, and an elementary school hallway where the quietest kid draws a crude doodle in his notebook. Everyone else sees a vague bird-thing when they look at Punpun Punyama. Punpun sees the same shape looking back from the mirror — a soft, cartoony outline where a face should be, a scrawl his family drew around him before he was born. The story does not argue with what it shows you. This is how Punpun experiences himself.

Home is an apartment where hope gets dented and abandoned, drained sip by sip until his father cracks, his mother calcifies into a woman who hits first and cries later, and his uncle drops in to deliver furious nihilism wrapped in a grin. Aiko Tanaka is the girl in his class who dreams of escape, and what ignites between them is not a childhood crush but a shared recognition — a promise that one day they will run so far their pasts never find them. Punpun cycles through his adolescent years in a quiet, observing dread, a passive character in a world that acts on him. By the time he is old enough to chase the promise adult, the bird shape has hardened, and the question his life asks is no longer whether he will ever be free but what he will destroy on his way to find out.

Also known as: Oyasumi Punpun, おやすみプンプン, Oyasumi Punpun.