Is Nichijou Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manga (shōnen), 12 volumes
Run	2006–present · ongoing
Community score	AniList 8.3 · MangaUpdates 8.1
Where to read	Vertical — official

Overview

Nichijou — "My Ordinary Life" — is a gag comedy about the very not-ordinary daily lives of a few high schoolers and the strange people around them. On paper it's slice-of-life: girls go to school, buy snacks, cram for tests. But every few pages it detours straight into the absurd — a principal suplexing a deer, a robot girl with a wind-up key in her back trying to pass as normal, a genius child professor and her talking cat. There's no real plot. It's a string of skits, and the whole joke is the gap between "ordinary life" and how insane it actually gets. It's written and drawn by Keiichi Arawi.

What it does well

The humor is the reason to read it, and it's genuinely inventive. Nichijou will build a whole page around something tiny — dropping a wiener on the floor, mishearing a word — and blow it up into a life-or-death set piece, then cut to something completely unrelated. That willingness to swing for the fences on any premise is what makes it special. When a gag connects, it's laugh-out-loud funny in a way very few comedies manage.

The art does a lot of the work. Arawi draws with a loose, springy style that snaps into huge exaggerated reactions exactly when a joke needs them. His timing on the page — the pause panel, the sudden giant closeup — is sharp, and it's the difference between a bit landing and dying. It's expressive without being messy.

The cast helps too. Yuuko, Mio, and Mai anchor the "normal" school side, while the Professor, the robot Nano, and the cat Sakamoto run a parallel household of pure nonsense. Even minor characters who show up for one gag tend to be memorable. You get attached to these weirdos even though almost nothing happens to them.

Where it falls short

The catch with any gag comedy is that it's hit-or-miss, and Nichijou misses plenty. It swings so hard and so often that a good chunk of the bits don't land, and you'll page through a few flat ones to get to a great one. How much that bothers you depends on your patience for that ratio.

There's also no story here at all. This is a pile of skits with no arc, no stakes, and no momentum — by design, but it means the book never builds toward anything. And a handful of jokes rely on rapid timing or wordplay that's simply harder to pull off in still panels than others.

Verdict

Nichijou is one of the sharpest absurd comedies out there when it's on, and it's on often enough to be worth it. Just go in knowing what it is: no plot, no throughline, just a firehose of jokes that range from brilliant to whatever. If you like your comedy weird and relentless and don't need a story to carry it, it's an easy one to keep by your bed and open to any page.