Is A Journal Of My Father Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

A man returns to his hometown of Tottori for his estranged father's wake, expecting a quiet, dutiful visit before heading back to his own life in Tokyo. Instead, the people who knew his father — relatives, old neighbors, former coworkers — start telling him stories he's never heard, filling in a version of his father he never let himself see while the man was alive. Taniguchi uses that single wake as a frame to work backward through decades of a strained, mostly silent relationship between father and son.

What it does well

This is quiet, patient storytelling built almost entirely out of memory and regret, and Taniguchi's naturalistic, detailed art style is perfectly suited to it — his linework captures small-town Japan with an almost documentary precision, giving the story's emotional weight something concrete to rest on instead of relying on melodrama. The structure, moving between the present-day wake and flashbacks triggered by each visitor's story, builds a genuinely moving portrait of a man the narrator spent years refusing to understand, without ever resorting to a big cathartic confrontation scene to make its point. It's a story about a son coming to terms with having closed his heart to his father, and it earns that emotional landing through accumulation rather than a single dramatic beat.

Where it falls short

The pacing is deliberately slow and reflective, which is exactly the point, but it means this isn't a manga for readers looking for narrative momentum or plot incident — very little actually "happens" in the present-day scenes beyond people talking and remembering. The emotional register stays fairly even throughout, which some readers will find restrained to the point of distance rather than quietly devastating. And at a single volume, it's over almost as soon as it gets going, which works for what it's trying to do but will leave readers wanting more of Taniguchi's world left wanting.

Verdict

This is a short, deeply humane story about grief, regret, and the gap between who we assume our parents are and who they actually were. If you want manga that treats an ordinary family relationship with real literary weight, this is one of the genre's quiet classics.