Is Back When You Called Us Devils Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manga, 154 chapters, 14 volumes
Run	2017–2020 · completed
Community score	AniList 7.6
Where to read	Kodansha USA / K MANGA — official

Overview

Yusuke Saito seems like an ordinary high schooler, aside from one detail: he can't remember anything from the past six months of his life. That gap becomes urgent fast, as people from his past start confronting him with accusations — bullying, blackmail, maiming, even murder. As Yusuke pieces together what he actually did during his missing time, the manga forces a genuinely uncomfortable question: if he can't remember being a monster, how much should he be held responsible for what he was?

Rather than building a sympathetic lead and asking readers to root for him despite his flaws, Back When You Called Us Devils commits to the opposite challenge — following a character the story itself calls a devil, and letting the discomfort of that premise do the work.

What it does well

The central mystery drives real tension through its first half: each new accusation against Yusuke escalates the stakes and the horror of what he might have done, and the slow reveal of his past is well-paced rather than rushed. Crucially, the story never tells you how to feel about him — his guilt, his memory loss, and his path toward possible redemption are left genuinely ambiguous, which is a harder and more interesting choice than a clean-cut redemption arc.

The gritty art style reinforces that unease throughout, and the manga uses its premise to engage with real social issues — bullying, sexual assault, and the long shadow of guilt — as substantive themes rather than shock dressing. It's a story that clearly knows what discomfort it's going for and doesn't flinch from it.

Where it falls short

The story's biggest imbalance is whose perspective gets the most weight: despite being built around the people Yusuke hurt, the manga spends far more time on his internal struggle toward atonement than on his victims' side of things, and several of them forgive him in ways that can feel more convenient for the narrative than earned given what he's accused of. For a story built on real-world seriousness, that imbalance is worth going in aware of.

The premise itself — spending an entire manga in the headspace of a character explicitly labeled a devil — is also going to be a hard sell for readers who need some baseline likability from a protagonist, even a flawed one. And some of the later-volume reveals lean harder into escalating shock than the tightly controlled mystery of the earlier chapters, which can make the later chapters feel less disciplined than where the story started.

Verdict

Back When You Called Us Devils is a genuinely uncomfortable, thought-provoking psychological drama that refuses to make its lead easy to root for — and that refusal is exactly what makes it worth reading, even where its handling of forgiveness feels unbalanced. Go in prepared for a dark, morally unresolved character study rather than a redemption story with clean answers.