Still haven't read but some comments say it's over hyped/overrated while others say it's a...

this is a personal favourite of mine so i may be biased and so won’t say “yeah you should totally read this” - here’s a summary.

so in short it’s at its core about sexual trauma and healing from it. this is definitely not brief but it is A Summary sorry LMAO but to try and condense it all down so you have a general understanding of how it goes in full & can judge for yourself:

the main character, hisaya yano, is a second year in high school from a poor family that attends his affluent high school on a scholarship. he ends up rooming with incredibly popular and incredibly freewheeling sono odajima, who sleeps around and acts in ways yano very, very much does not like. yano ends up catching odajima sleeping with a girl while trying to hunt him down because he misses roll call, thinks about it, & odajima ends up fooling around w/ him. it’s presented as pretty cliche at first with this and then it kind of unravels the more they interact as yano comes to the slow realisation he’s attracted to odajima. odajima meanwhile is revealed to have been hiding feelings for yano for a while & his acting out towards him has been on purpose to try and push him away because he’d rather be miserable of his own doing than miserable knowing not only has everything he’s worked for (as he’s been playing around as a form of self-enforced conversion therapy) moot but also there’s no way he’d ever be able to have what he wanted (the boy he likes) without ruining him. his dad had an affair with a man & he caught them in the act, which inflicted psychological & sexual trauma onto him because he involuntarily physiologically reacted to it as he discovered men could engage with other men thru that incident, forcing him down before he could ever even acknowledge he liked men. odajima then tries to make one final push to make yano hate him, his psyche continues to unravel, the two of them eventually touch base as yano realises and acknowledges the feelings he’s struggled with since chapter 2, and odajima’s psyche is finally able to recover.

so basically one incredibly not-brief summary of events later (sorry. it’s just that so much happens in this story i don’t really know how to explain it in a super brief way without cutting out a lot that’s important to the crux of it especially because you’re not sure whether it’s a story that would appeal to you or not) it’s a story about sexual trauma and internalised homophobia and coming to terms with / healing from that. i think the best way i would describe it is as “comphet psychological horror with a happy ending” because a lot of the paneling surrounding odajima especially as his psyche crumbles is very much horror-style

THANK YOU so much!! you just convinced me to read this (i've been procrastinating this read actually lololol), def my typa cup of tea!

YAYYYY omg i’m glad to hear my incredibly not brief summary actually made you interested in trying it out. i hope you end up liking pittosporum in the end when you read!!! i think it’s a really well-told & well-crafted story :-)

OH MY GOD IT WAS AMAZING

WASN’T IT….. ahhh i’m so glad to hear you liked it in the end!!!!!! i really do like pittosporum so so much i have so much i can say about it and its storytelling. it’s so good. yano and odajima deserve to be happy together forever