Dissapearence diary is, so far, the only auto biographical manga I've ever read (as far as I know, ''A Journal of My Father'' isn't). I didn't know who this author was, and I thought it was going to be kind of like Inio Asano/Naoki Urasawa, but I was surprised when I found out that he was a lolicon artist, one of the most influential figures of it's development. Let's hop in. My favorite thing about the manga is it's tone. It's a very sober manga for the situation it portrays. It's clear that Azuma is not a mentally well person, but it's never shown that explicitly, he treatshis dissapearences as something casual, he removes all the reality from it and I think that gives the work a beautiful thematical dichotomy. All is viewed through lens of indifferency torwards the world, like nothing is his business. Even when describing bad people he has to interact with or his actions and tragedies, he just uses such a casual tone you have to wonder ''does he even care'' like when he says that his wiife is probably going to divorce him, you think of all the pain his scapeds must have caused on her, but he just brushes it off in the next scene, it makes you wonder how their relationship is under that layer of indiferency. It's very funny to see Osamu Tezuka named so casually when most people in the industry treat him as a God.
Maybe I'm reading too much, but I like to think this is how you are suppossed to view this. It really makes a contrast with other more dramatical works, here the acts themselves tell as much as you need to know and the atmosphere just emphasizes that feeling of stress and the desire to scape it the author has.
I have to say that I found the second part a bit boring, it wasn't as interesting as the first or last part with the first homeless experience and the rehab center respectively. I understand that how things happened, but I'm judging the manga, not his life (mine is pretty boring too anyways).
The art is ok, on part with the decade, it's very clean and it fulfills it's porpuse. Maybe I'm too used to modern manga, but the scenes and shots felt a little plain, but hey, it's good enough to not get on the way.
After this I tried to read more of Azuma's works, but I was unable to find many, and the few I did were, to put it lightly, vastly different. Maybe this sharp contrast makes me appreciate this work even more.
It's a very good manga, I recommend it.