Ogeha is an interesting departure from the usual romance stories. It’s not explicitly one in writing but it does come off as one.

Everything starts when our sociopath of a main character finds a huge larvae and for whatever reason decides to rip it with a stick to get to the bug inside. The bug inside is the titular Ogeha or as her bug friends call her, Inferno. She’s a weird but kinda cute looking hybrid between a human and a butterfly with some extra abilities under her hood. He calls her disgusting, grabs her by the legs and drags her over some steps, which knocks her out. Then, after dragging her to his house, he puts her in a shitty little box and feeds her a pickle.

This is Kiji, a main character of the story that you’re supposed to care about, one you’re supposed to root for as his relationship with Ogeha kinda gets better and one you’re supposed to sympathize with when she’s forced to leave and he goes out to look for her. We barely started but we already have a protagonist that’s severely unlikable. As author themselves point out in the afterword, they wanted to make a character based on a type of person that reflect on their actions but isn’t very expressive about it on the outside which often makes people think they’re insensitive. Because of this she insisted on not having any lines or even really body language or anything that would express his change despite editors suggesting otherwise. While it might be a nice intention, what we end up getting is a character that acts like a psycho and then makes a 180 for unknown reasons. At best you as a reader can ascribe some motivation onto the character in whatever way makes sense to you but it’s not reader’s job to write the story.

Most of the manga pretty much focuses on these very poorly presented interactions between Ogeha and Kiji and it’s one of its biggest downfalls. Aside from that all we have going on is this weird subplot about giant centipedes that kill people to get nutrients and look for Ogeha so she can lay them some quality eggs before she dies. We don’t know who these guys are, what their long term plan is, why Ogeha is this weird creature and why can’t they just find another one that isn’t born prematurely. Not all of these questions have to be answered. It would be just fine if Ogeha was some unexplained creature Kiji finds but when you add in these strange centipedes that are extremely motivated to find Ogeha and make her breed as soon as possible I want to at least know why it’s such a crisis and what their plan is, since having a few of those butterflies also means killing quite a few people to feed them. I feel like it only exists as an excuse to separate her from Kiji and have an emotional reunion while killing off easily dispensable characters.

I wish that was the only thing detracting from the main narrative but it’s far from it. A bunch of page space goes to classmates of Kiji who are only used to move other plot elements along and add nothing to the manga overall. There’s a subplot about a blind hobo who hates people cause they’re cruel which culminated in Ogeha murdering some teenagers which is never brought up again. These deviations and lack of proper focus on anything in particular makes this manga a complete mess thematically. I read it and glanced over some parts again to make sure but I couldn’t really make out what the point even was. Not being prejudiced against people? Was it about how people can change to become better? I have no idea and there’s nothing in this manga to make out a coherent theme and on top of that there’s even less to point out what’s the point of that theme even was cause even if there was one it sure as hell wasn’t explored.

The way I see it this manga only has 2 good points and they’re rather superficial.
First one is that Ogeha herself is adorable. Despite being a somewhat ugly looking combination of bug and human the author put in a lot of effort to make her seem cute and likable. She comes off as a naive, very impressionable child that’s excited about learning the world but her lack of awareness evokes that “I want to protect this” feeling. I genuinely enjoyed the moments like her discovering TV for the first time, watching Titanic and panicking when it turns off cause she’s worried about what will happen to the characters, or the way she befriend a nutcracker toy that persists as her friend throughout the manga. Maybe if all the unnecessary plot points were stripped out the manga was focused on redeeming Kiji and Ogeha slowly learning about the world around her it would be better as a whole.

Second and last good point for me is art. While it’s not exceptional there’s a lot of detail in it and afterword sheds some light on how dedicated the author was to researching for the manga. They crawled around without using legs, to get a feel for how it would Ogeha would move around; they made a hobo house out of their bathroom to make sure hobo houses in the manga make sense visually and they even went back and redrew some pages after noticing a character doesn’t have a trash bin and air conditioner in their room. While there’s many flaws it’s obvious that the author put some love into it and that’s always nice.

While this review is rather negative overall, the manga is short enough that you could read it in an hour or two so if you have a passing interest in it, it’s probably worth a try. It’s worth mentioning that it’s pretty well paced and paneled so instead of dragging on the whole thing is a smooth read.