Shikabane Shoujo follows a bizarre story of Lili, an undead little girl that was brought to life after the death of a certain genius lady painter, and Neil, a painter who can’t seem to find a reason to paint. If you prefer stories with straightforward development and neat conclusions, this one might not be for you. It seems to revolve around the concept of soul and whether it can really traverse bodies, circumstances and time. Lily is told that her soul is the soul of another person and she is struggling to understand whether she should strive to become whatever it is that she oncewas that she doesn’t remember, and she’s told that she has to learn to paint to remember. Neil used to paint little girls as embodiments of fleeting ideal beauty (because kids grow up rapidly and become new versions of themselves), but now he seems lost and can’t paint. And then he meets Lily, who looks like a little girl, but is in fact a talking corpse whose beauty is unnatural and creepy and not fleeting at all. Their relationship is weird but somehow genuine and pure.

The whole cast of side characters seems to be struggling to cope with tragedy of losing things and people that they once loved. Are they defined by the things that they lost, that are like fantoms imprinted on them? Can those things really be replaced?

Despite mainly revolving around topics of death, soul and artistic expression, this manga is surprisingly not depressing at all and is in fact very easy and even fun (?) to read. For such a short read it asks too many questions to unpack, questions that some readers might find too abstract and pointless, and in return gives no real answers and kind of leaves you wondering what the hell was this story about. Which is the reason I enjoyed it, because I think that no answers are better than half-assed ones.