Reviewed by Kana
Who it's for, and whether it holds up.
The title tells you almost everything you need to know, and the novel delivers on that promise without much surprise. Eiji's childhood girlfriend cheats on him with the school soccer ace and then pins a domestic violence accusation on him, and from there the story splits its time fairly unevenly between romance and karmic retribution. One reader summed it up as roughly twenty percent romance and eighty percent detective drama, which feels about right. The appeal is blunt and honest: watching cartoonishly rotten antagonists get their due, one convenient coincidence at a time.
With a 3.0 out of 5 on NovelUpdates from a hundred votes, the reception is lukewarm, and it is easy to understand why. The villains exist to be despised rather than understood, Kondo in particular reads as a power-fantasy target rather than a believable high school student, and the narrative grows repetitive once the revenge machinery starts churning. Eiji functions mainly as a recipient of good fortune, and the story never really interrogates why Miyuki became who she became, which might have given the whole thing some weight.
What keeps readers coming back, at least for a while, is the satisfaction of thorough consequences. The story does not let antagonists off lightly, and there is a certain guilty-pleasure pull in that. The romance with Ai, the fellow rooftop misfit who becomes his anchor, has warmth even if it lacks much nuance. If you want a story that complicates its premise, this is not it. But if you just want to watch the other shoe drop, repeatedly, the novel does that with commitment.
