Is Happiness Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Happiness starts with one of the oldest setups in horror and makes it feel intimate and strange. Makoto Okazaki is an ordinary, lonely high-schooler — quiet, bullied, easy to overlook. One night he's attacked by a mysterious girl who turns out to be a vampire, and she offers him a choice: die, or become like her. He chooses to live, and wakes up changed. Drawn by Shuzo Oshimi, the artist behind The Flowers of Evil and Blood on the Tracks, the manga is less interested in vampire action than in what it feels like to suddenly become something other than human while still being a scared teenager.

What it does well

Oshimi is one of the best artists working in this register, and Happiness is a showcase. His linework is delicate and his faces are extraordinarily expressive, catching tiny flickers of fear, shame, and longing. He's a master of the quiet, uneasy moment — a held gaze, an empty hallway, a small physical detail that suddenly feels wrong — and that control is what makes the book genuinely unsettling. It doesn't lean on gore (though there's some); it lets dread build in the spaces between events.

The smartest thing it does is treat vampirism as a metaphor rather than a gimmick. Makoto's transformation maps neatly onto adolescence itself: the alienation, the new and frightening urges, the sense of a body and a self changing in ways you can't control or explain to anyone. That gives the horror real emotional weight. His loneliness was already painful before the bite; afterward it becomes unbearable, and the manga sits with that ache instead of rushing past it. The early volumes, in particular, are gripping — a slow, melancholy spiral that's hard to put down.

The supporting cast deepens it. The people around Makoto — the friend who worries about him, the girl drawn into his orbit, the strangers who sense something is off — all reflect different facets of his isolation, and Oshimi handles them with the same careful attention he gives his lead.

Where it falls short

The problem is that Happiness doesn't hold its shape. Around the midpoint the focus shifts and a timeskip jumps the story forward, and a lot of the careful tension built in those early volumes leaks away. The later volumes are more diffuse, introducing new threads and pulling away from the intimate character study that made the opening so strong. Worst of all is the ending, which arrives abruptly and leaves major questions unresolved; readers hoping the buildup would pay off in a clear, satisfying conclusion often feel shortchanged. This was always a mood piece more than a plot machine, but even on its own terms the structure gets shaky.

Verdict

Happiness is a beautiful, deeply uneasy manga that uses vampirism to say something true about being young and alone. Oshimi's art and atmosphere are reason enough to read it, and the first half is excellent. The wandering second half and unsatisfying ending keep it out of his top tier, so adjust your expectations: come for the mood, the dread, and the aching character work, not for a tidy story. On those terms, it's well worth a look.