A bullied high school boy named Butayama knows a secret that no one else at school does: the popular idol Miyu Takamine once appeared in an “image video,” a type of softcore adult production. Butayama, an outcast who endures daily humiliation, suddenly finds himself sharing a fragile connection with the girl everyone adores. Over the course of a single summer, the two unlikely figures navigate the tension between exploitation and genuine intimacy, forming a bond that neither of them expected.

This story is the centerpiece of a five-story collection that explores the lives of people society often overlooks or scorns. In “Mi Amigo,” a man named Yamamoto, who has been fired from one job after another, turns to “papakatsu” — a form of compensated dating with older men — to survive. He finds himself in a disastrous threesome that forces him to confront his own desperation. Other tales in the collection feature a young girl’s misdirected efforts to help, a painfully bittersweet story called “Peter Pan Complex,” and a narrative involving junior idols and the murky industry behind them.

Throughout the anthology, the author’s young sensibility — he won the Chiba Tetsuya Award Grand Prize at age seventeen — infuses even the most sordid situations with a strange, crooked hopefulness. The stories are populated with weak, cowardly, unattractive characters who still manage to live on, sometimes foolishly, sometimes cheerfully. The collection does not flinch from depicting the vulgar, the low-class, and the defeated, but it also insists that these lives are worth affirming. The tone alternates between dark comedy and genuine pathos, and the artwork often exaggerates the ugliness of the characters while finding a weird warmth in their struggles. The setting is contemporary Japan, dipping into the underbellies of school life, sex work, and the entertainment industry.