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The stories, while undeniably hentai, have surprising beauty and subtlety and are grounded in a deep and profound understanding of humor and human emotion and pathos. This sensibility extends not only to the lovely artwork, but to the dialogue as well, and it enriches stories that, by all rights, would otherwise have been valued solely for their ability to titillate.
Even in translation, the masterful prose, although somewhat coarsened, shines through. Take, for example, the final lines of the first of ten short stories included, "Lonely Night Bird":
"Suo?"
"Yes ma'am?"
"Has Daddy left already?"
"Yes, for another month."
"Suo?"
"Yes, ma'am?"
<Mistress Sana...>
<Please don't cry. I always...>
"It'll be light soon, won't it...?"
<I'll always be by your side.>
It is rare to find a even mainstream manga with such a wonderful and subtle expression of loneliness and devoted desire to dispel that unique sorrow. To see it in a hentai manga is amazing.
Utatane delights in sexual ambiguity. A man dresses as a charming schoolgirl. A girl costumes herself as a boy. A woman is actually neither. A boy is so delicately beautiful that he could easily be a girl though there is no attempt to hide his gender. It may be viewed a sort of taboo-breaking, but such ambiguity runs rampant in manga, and Utatane's liberal use of it perhaps reflects his connections to the Japanese doujinshi culture.
Of course, Countdown is primarily a hentai manga, and anyone who doesn't appreciate that fact will be disappointed and perhaps even disgusted. Indeed, all of the art once censored in accordance with Japanese law at the time has been explicitly redrawn for an American audience, and one story was completely rewritten to remove any references to sexual relations between two minors. Nontheless, the work is understandably less graphic that it might have been otherwise had it not originally been created in under censor.
As such, Countdown is absolutely *not* appropriate for children. However, for adults who enjoy hentai manga, as one of the greatest and most famous of hentai manga, it is a must. Even those who've never seen hentai manga before but enjoy manga should see it...if only to savor Utatane's exquisite art and storytelling.
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