First published in 2002 and partially released by Tokyopop not long after, it would be easy, and maybe even comforting, to write Keiko Suenobu's Life off as a relic of the past. The art certainly upholds this wishful thinking; Suenobu's style is very much of the early 2000s with the way she draws eyes and lips, and the flip phones, lack of social media, and artfully scrunched “tall socks” worn by the fashionable girls all speak to a world twenty years in the past. But the reason Kodansha has rescued this license isn't nostalgia. Even two decades after its initial release, Life presents a viciously recognizable picture of the social hellscape that middle and high school can be.

The story follows Ayumu, whom we first meet when she's in her third and final year of middle school. Her best friend, whom she sees as being her academic superior, is aiming for a specific, pretty good high school. (A throwaway remark indicates that while it's better academically than where Ayumu originally saw herself, it's also not the top school out there.) It's been her dream to go there since she was little, and Ayumu, desperate to remain with her best friend, declares that she'll aim for it as well. Ayumu throws herself into her studying, drastically improving her grades, and the result is that she outperforms her “smarter” friend, getting into her friend's dream school while the friend does not. Hurt and angry, Ayumu's friend turns on her, and their friendship is destroyed.

There are several unsettling implications contained in this introduction, which comprises the first double-length chapter of the volume. Chief among them is that Ayumu's friend perhaps enjoyed being “the smart one” of their duo, hanging around with Ayumu because it made her feel better about herself. This is supported by the way she basks in Ayumu's statements about how smart she is, often begging for her friend's help with her own studies. When the façade is revealed to be just that, she can't handle it, and her anguish causes her to turn on the girl who has stood by her. But also implied that Ayumu never was the dumb one in the group. Scenes at her house show us a mother much more devoted to her younger sister – Ayumu's mother ignores her until she announces what high school she's going to try for. It looks very much like any idea Ayumu has of her own lack of intelligence comes directly from her mother, a woman who can't even be bothered to listen to her older daughter when she tries to talk to her about school or to notice when she walks in the door with an “I'm home.”

Given these circumstances, it isn't surprising that Ayumu turns to cutting. According to Johns Hopkins, “Most teens who cut are struggling with powerful emotions. To them, cutting might seem like the only way to express or interrupt feelings that seem too intense to endure…many times they're dealing with emotional pain or difficult situations that no one knows about.” This is absolutely true of Ayumu, and Suenobu's use of her cutting shows that this isn't just a bad teen gimmick she's thrown into the manga to look more “real.” Ayumu carries her box cutter around with her, describing the feeling of having it as “a safe space in my pocket.” In one scene, we see an image of her fleeing through the darkness towards a slit of light; as she falls through the opening, she transforms into a trickle of blood. It's a powerful scene, as well as an indication that the creator really does know what she's doing.

Ayumu's cutting has another effect, that of making her more self-conscious. She has scars on her forearms by the time high school starts, and she's beginning to panic about having to wear the summer uniform and what people will say when they see them. This is reasonable anxiety, especially since she's now primed to be afraid of interacting with other girls in her class. She'd like friends, but she's fearful of making them, and her most peaceful moment is when she finds a small space between structures on the school roof to crouch in. Again, the image of her hunkered down behind a fence, surrounded by cigarette butts and other detritus as she huddles in the shadows is very powerful; as a bullied teen I often sought out such spaces because there was safety in being where no one else would think to go. Suenobu doesn't spell this out as she does with the cutting, but it still resonates strongly as a realistic depiction of Ayumu's inner turmoil.

Eventually, Ayumu does fall into a friendship with Mana, a self-consciously cutesy classmate who seems to define herself by her adorability and her boyfriend. Mana also tries to isolate Ayumu from the other girls in class while simultaneously inserting herself into the group most likely framed as the “popular girls” – the ones who think they're more mature than everyone else because they're having sex and wear more makeup. Mana, unsurprisingly, turns out to be unstable, and by the end of the volume, it feels like Ayumu is in an even more precarious situation because of it. Mana may not have deliberately set out to use Ayumu for her own ends, but that's a dangerously plausible possibility at the close of the volume.

Life comes with hefty content warnings for self-harm, suicide ideation, and bullying. It isn't interested in glossing things over, and it could, for some readers, skirt perilously close to the border of torture porn. But that's how being a teenager can feel, especially if you're on the outside of social norms, and that's what Suenobu is trying to depict. It's not an easy read, and I'm not sure if I could have handled it were I not so many years removed from having lived it. But it's a book that needs to exist, and one that's worth reading.