Is What Do You Call This Trash? Worth Reading?

Overview

What Do You Call This Trash? wastes no time setting up its central discomfort: Yuuto Konatsu is infatuated with Akira, the woman his older brother Kai just broke up with. Akira is clingy, obsessive, and manipulative, and she quickly starts exploiting Yuuto's emotional weaknesses the same way she apparently did with his brother -- who ended things with her specifically because of this behavior, a warning Yuuto hears and ignores anyway.

What unfolds is less a romance than a character study: a portrait of an unhealthy, codependent relationship the narrator understands is bad for him and can't bring himself to escape, told with a bluntly self-deprecating title that reflects how little he thinks of the situation -- and possibly of himself.

What it does well

The manga's biggest strength is its refusal to soften what it's depicting. Toxic relationships in fiction often get romanticized or played for angsty drama with an eventual redemption arc; this one stays honest about how manipulation actually works on someone who already knows better; Yuuto isn't drawn as a naive victim so much as someone making a self-destructive choice with open eyes, which makes the character study more uncomfortable and more interesting than a simpler 'red flags ignored' story.

Its short, tight length also works in its favor -- two volumes is enough to sit with the discomfort without it becoming a long-running commitment, and the blunt title sets reader expectations honestly from the start.

Where it falls short

The same unflinching quality that makes this interesting also makes it a hard sell for readers who want someone to root for -- there's no healthy relationship here, and no clear redemption arc either. The short length, while an asset for pacing, also means less room to dig into why Yuuto keeps choosing this path, which some readers may find leaves the character study feeling thinner than its premise promises. Reception reflects this divide: it's the kind of manga readers either find bracingly honest or simply unpleasant.

Verdict

What Do You Call This Trash? is a deliberately uncomfortable character study that earns its blunt title. It won't work as a romance for readers who need likable leads or a satisfying arc, but as an unflinching look at codependency, it's worth the discomfort if that's what you're looking for.