Because of his low page count and the resulting need for many panels, Tatsumi's editor suggested that he forgo speech bubbles to help focus on the art, which led to his silent protagonists.

[9] The combination of a fetus and the sewer would also appear in "My Hitler" and a six-volume epic titled Jigoku no Gundan (地獄の軍団, "Army Corps of Hell"), indicating "intense obsessions" by Tatsumi.

[9] Other stories in the collection that focus on childbirth include "Black Smoke", "The Burden", and "Test Tube", which have in common Tatsumi's themes of sexual humiliation, economic inadequacy, and disgust related to reproduction.

[9] Carlo Santos of Anime News Network felt that the dead baby trope and pushover protagonists were overused by Tatsumi to elicit emotion.

Santos concludes that "although the stories hammer the same point over and over again, and seemingly with the same character each time, their brutal honesty and stark settings will be a refreshing change for readers who wonder whatever happened to the diversity of the [manga] artform.

"[12] Ng Suat Tong of the Hooded Utilitarian criticized the art, describing it as "crude, inexperienced and laid down with the kind of haste which begets mistakes" as well as the predictable misogyny in the stories and their linear structure, especially disliking "Telescope".

[2] Andrew D. Arnold of Time complimented the naturalism of the stories and art, but disliked the misogyny present in the men's relationships, concluding that the collection "feels as fresh and revelatory as when the works of Japanese cinema first began arriving in the U.S."[15] R.C.

Baker of The Village Voice said that the manga's expressive art helped speak for its silent characters and that the subject matter distinguished itself from modern Japanese popular culture: "A fearless spelunker of the id, Tatsumi delves beneath the button-down uniformity of Japan's legions of office drones.

"[17] David Cozy of the Asahi Herald Tribune felt that manga was distinguished from literature with the eight-page limit—which forced Tatsumi to distill his stories and was appropriate for representing his "characters' constricted lives"—as well as with the identifiable "everyman" in his art.