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Hi Fonzies! Hope all of you have been doing well. As we enter the endemic phase, we’re all slowly getting back to how life was, going out with friends, going to class, and generally enjoying life for what it really is. Even though life is slowly getting back to normal, I can’t help but have late nights where I just ponder about the why of it all, and can't help but think about how valuable life is. Value is a fickle construct that sometimes makes sense, and sometimes just simply does not. For example, making popcorn at home sounds like a great snack, but popcorn at the cinemas? Think I’ll need to sell my kidneys for that. Or another example to ponder, should a monkey jpeg be worth hundreds and thousands of dollars just because a bunch of crypto-bros gave it value? (I’m of course talking about NFTs). But if there's one thing we can all agree that we can’t put a price on, it's life itself. But what if we can? What if you could derive value from someone's life, based on their past, present and future? Based on their happiness, their influence, etc? What if your entire worth as a human being could be boiled down to a single monetary value? What would you do with it? Would you sell it? Would you keep it? Would you even want to know at that point? This is exactly what “Three Days of Happiness” explores, and might be one of the most impactful short manga I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.
Without getting into too many spoilers, we begin with our protagonist: Kusonoki. He’s a 20 year old struggling to pay rent and pay for food, working in a dead end job scraping for table scraps. One day while selling his albums for quick change, he was told of a place that could buy his lifespan, time or health for money. Sceptical, but most certainly desperate, he decides to give it a shot, because surely someone’s life is worth a good buck, maybe RM500k, or even a million, so how much could it be? 300,00 yen. That’s about only RM10114 for the ENTIRE remainder of his life. That's about 10000 happy meals, or a year’s worth of rent, or 3 GSC popcorns(sorry I just think they are WAY TOO OVERPRICED). He decides to sell his life and is left with only 3 months left to live. Of course, tell a person they have about a month to live and they might just go do crazy stuff, living life without any restrictions or barriers, every societal norm imposed onto them will be broken and it might be dangerous, all in an attempt to just to “go out with a bang.” So to prevent something destructive from happening, he is given an observer by the name of Miyagi, who keeps him company till his final days.
If you couldn’t tell already from the premise, Three Days of Happiness is an introspective story centred about the value of life, how best to spend your time here on Earth and what it means to enrich your own life. It’s a relatively short story, but it knows exactly the message it wants to send, so we get a short, concise story that hits and hits HARD. Because how do we even begin to calculate an individual’s worth? Do we solely go by what they contribute to society? How much happiness is in their life? Or by how much they influence the happiness of those around them? Are we simply going by current accomplishments or inherent future potential? Concepts like these aren't something we think about on a daily basis, and the more you do the more bleak and harsh reality becomes. And for someone like our protagonist Kusonoki, how do you even begin to process the fact that your life is worth such little value, and now that he sold it, essentially has a time limit and is forced to come to terms with all of his life regrets and trauma while figuring out how to best spend his remaining days. It’s a tale that’s painfully relatable, not just because it's about a story of a guy who's figuring out what he wants to do in life before he passes, but what we see here is a journey of a soul that feels completely lost.
The Fonz Content Creation Team
Praba