Meet the most melancholy high school teacher in Japan: Nozomu Itoshiki, whose fashion sense is strictly nineteenth-century, whose personal goal is self-annihilation, and whose signature phrase is “I’m in despair!” He’s similar to Franz Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre—if Kafka and Sartre had had to deal with a classroom of short-skirted, lovesick students. And to make matters worse, Itoshiki’s family wants him to get married. Forget the bride, here comes the gloom!