hi! iâm felix. i read a truly upsetting amount of manga. i read more broadly than i generally review here, as i try to stick to the things i like that i feel donât get that much attention in the english speaking world, so more âmatureâ josei (and seinen) dramas and romances are the bulk of what youâll see here, and i avoid giving my opinion on anything thatâs wildly popular or well-reviewed, since it isnât really my purpose to add my voice to an already robust conversation, but rather to help people discover new things to enjoy! i will still post caps of more well-known stuff as i read it sometimes, i just donât see the point in recommending or reviewing things people are already well aware of.Â
i read both english and japanese, and i make clear in my reviews whether or not a series is available in english in its entirety-- i will stick mostly to things that are available at least partially in english. if thereâs ever something iâve read that isnât entirely available in english, but you donât read japanese and are dying to finish it, reach out to me and i might be able to help you by either at least giving you a breakdown of what happens, or, if i still have my notes, making my translation available to you. iâm an amateur and i work slowly but iâll do my best!Â
feel free to send in recommendations via ask any time! iâll read at least a chapter or two of just about anything tbh. just let me know in your ask if youâd prefer i answer privately, and if youâre looking for me to do a review or let you know what i think! this isnât my main, its a side project, so ask is the best way to reach out!Â
my header is from & by okazaki mari, and my icon is from hirunaka no ryuusei
overview: this is a story about a directionless woman in her mid-late twenties, aoki kaoru, who works as a clerk in the outpatient department of a hospital. she wants to start a nail salon thatâs open late for office ladies as a side business, and relies on the help of an old underclassman from college, âshiro-chan,â to lend her space in the building he rents for his own computer programming business. kaoru has had a hard time dating in the past and is inexperienced, because she hates to be touched by others. at work she meets an older absolute trainwreck of a man, a 45-year old surgeon named yagai kouga. heâs well-respected but known to be unpleasant, harsh, and fairly crass to others. kaoru is immediately interested in him after a few interactions, finds that she doesnât mind being touched by him, and before she knows it sheâs trying to get closer to him, while he sends probably the most incredibly mixed signals iâve ever seen in my long manga-reading career. shiro-chan is, predictably, also in love with kaoru, and has been since college, but has a hard time speaking up about it. it plays early on like itâs going to be more of a love-triangle story, but for the most part shiro-chanâs interest isnât really treated as a serious threat to the burgeoning relationship between kaoru and yagai-sensei and the manga focuses more on that and their difficulties with each other, which come to focus more and more on yagaiâs messy life.Â
I know I crow about its merits constantly and its rightfully earned place as one of the best josei drama manga Iâve ever read, so for any English-only readers who want to finish it or who havenât gotten around to it yet, it seems a new group has picked up Okazaki Mariâs & (And), itâs updating again for the first time in a few years! If itâs not on your scanlation site of choice, DM me and Iâll be happy to link you to mine!
overview:Â happy new year! i am here with the first manga i finished in 2021 that i liked enough to write about. this was kind of a departure for me because it was marked as shounen, which i usually give a wide berth to, but also as romance and historical, and the cover was nice and it was on a list iâm working my way through, so, i thought, why not? it was not what i expected! it definitely feels more shounen than shoujo, despite being a very sweet romance, as the charactersâ love for each other is simple, straightfoward, never questioned, and totally not insecure in the way that tends to be the focus of shoujo manga. plus the sexual elements (light and never nsfw) feel very boy-ish, for lack of a better term, a lot of jokes about porn. that said, its actually very sweet and innocent and not at all gross. i need to impress upon you that this manga made me extremely emotional and has a purity of spirit and clarity of messaging to it that made me weak in the knees. wow, iâm really going on tonight. anyway, this is a taisho-era story about a rich boy (tamahiko) who, at 17, is in an accident which takes the life of his mother as well as crippling his right arm. his dad sends him off to their house in the sticks to hide him away and replaces him in the family with one of his brothers. tamahiko resigns himself to dying in obscurity out there and ceases eating, etc. the dad purchases a girl, 13, from a family who owes him a great debt (yuzuki) to help care for the somewhat disabled tamahiko and become his wife. the story follows them as they fall in love and live their lives, as well as the friends and family they make along the way, over a period of 5 or 6 years.
available in english? yes, i had no trouble finding this
nsfw? not really, no
things i liked: i started touching on this in the overview, despite my usual commitment to brevity there, but this really genuinely moved me. i stayed up until 3 am with this. i didnât really expect it from a âgirl sold to pay a debt forced into marriage with a pessimistic unwanted son of a rich familyâ kind of story. i donât know if its partially because it wasnât the usual kind of predictable shoujo and josei storylines that i tend to read, but it was quite refreshing. it was straightforward and optimistic and carried a strong message about learning to live for other people and learning to love those around you, opening yourself to the world for love. it sounds very trite, and believe me, for those of you who donât know me personally, iâm normally a very cynical and unemotional kind of person, but it really has an earnestness and a charm that allows it to carry off such a saccharine message with grace. normally i canât stand stories that encourage people to live for another personâs sake, because honestly people die and leave and its terribly inadvisable and unsustainable, but iâm letting it slide here. this made me believe in love. the art is also very, very cute.Â
things i didnât like:Â hm. sometimes when people do bad things in this they have a very cartoonish villain-for-villainyâs-sake vibe to them. often these characters are later humanized and given some kind of motivation, but not always. then again the good characters are mostly just good because, also. iâm kind of grasping at straws, honestly, i really enjoyed reading this and nothing instantly comes to mind in the dislike pile.Â
i would check this out if:Â you want to enjoy a refreshingly straightforward and ultimately positive, but very emotional along the way, story about the triumph of love over adversity. or youâre like me in that youâll read anything with a melancholy looking dude in that taisho-era stand collared dress shirt under kimono and hakama get up. idk whatâs wrong with me but it always sells me on at least a chapter.Â
i would avoid this if: you need a lot of complexity and betrayal (there are plenty of twists and turns to this, but it feels very simple, somehow, since the foundational relationship is never really called into question imo), you only read stuff that is more âadult,â you are looking for things with a lot of action. or if youâre really bothered by the concept of a young girl sold off to be a wife, but its actually very chaste and the age gap is small as these things go.Â
overview: usemono yado is a josei supernatural... romance? tragedy? in three volumes. it centers around an inn, the inn of lost things, where the spirits of people who have died with regrets can come and stay until they find the thing theyâre looking for, at which point they move on. people who stay for a very long time become workers at the inn, chief among them the mysterious childlike landlady, who helps many of the guests find what theyâre looking for. there is also a âshadyâ man named matsuura, who often escorts guests to the gates of the inn, and who has a mysterious connection to the landlady. the story is mostly episodic, told in seasonal tales of each guest and their lost item, with the third volume escalating to the story of the landlady herself.Â
available in english? yep!
nsfw? no, though there are instances of violenceÂ
things i liked:Â i want to say this was recommended to me a long time ago in a search i made for things that were a certain kind of depressing and supernatural but that might not be true, i might be combining it with something else. anyway the melancholy and mysterious mood of this was potent and good for me, and the way that it slowly ramps up into just unapologetically tragic, unflinchingly sad, in the last volume was very satisfying for me personally. i thought it was delicately written and well executed. i like the art a lot as well.Â
things i didnât like:Â i donât really have any specific complaints about this, but i did kind of forget about it for a while, meaning to finish it up after i had finished something else, but then just didnât come back to it for a few months, which probably means it wasnât particularly gripping. iâm glad i did eventually remember to pick it back up, though, because the final volume was worth the trip for sure.Â
i would check this out if:Â youâre into stories of ghosts, loss, regret, lives lost and lives wasted, stories without much hope in them. supernatural tragedy sluts join me in the pit.Â
i would avoid this if:Â youâre looking for a happy ending to any of the episodes or overall, you require a lot of action to be entertained, you want to invest in a romance that isnât pre-doomedÂ
overview: sekine-kun no koi is a josei romance that follows a male protagonist, sekine keiichiro (30), a successful and attractive salaryman who is a prisoner to his own passivity in life. heâs always been well-liked (mainly due to his good looks) and done well at everything heâs tried, but mostly just did what was expected or asked of him, including everything from being student council president and captain of sports teams in school, to dating people because they asked him and breaking up when they asked for that, too. heâs a miserable, hollow dude. in his quest for random hobbies trying to fill the void heâs identified in his life, he ends up in a handicrafts store to buy some yarn (and ends up taking stage magic lessons from a weird old man who owns the place) and gets to know the proprietorâs granddaughter, from whom he learns to knit and crochet, which he ends up being exceptionally talented at. it doesnât really bring him any more joy than anything else heâs tried, but it keeps him busy and heâs great at it. however, meeting kisaragi sara, the aforementioned granddaughter and knitter, mixes his life up in ways that he absolutely does not and cannot understand. watch as he attempts to understand the first thing about other people or, moreover, about his own damn self.Â
available in english? yeah, you should have no problem finding all 5 volumes of this
nsfw? yes, this manga features brief scenes of sex and nudity, though nothing prolonged or âexplicit,â as it were
things i liked: this is by kawachi haruka, i had forgotten that i added it to my âto readâ list after finishing natsuyuki rendezvous (see my review of that as well, if youâre interested) and seeing the synopsis, until just today. it features that same clean, appealing art that i really love. iâm really in awe of this and how much i liked it. natsuyuki rendezvous i enjoyed for its uniqueness, but it didnât really land with me in the same way that sekine-kun did, iâm so glad i came back to my list and saw this sitting in there. my chest just ached for sekine the entire time i was reading this, his particular brand of absolute helplessness really had me in knots for him. it was exactly the kind of emotional that gets me, which is the kind where you just watch someone go âis it really supposed to be this hard?â the entire time, a question which i personally have been trying to answer my entire life. i vibed with sekine, and i loved him a little bit, too. when the characters in the manga talk about not being able to leave him alone because heâs so helpless and pathetic, i felt that. a really unusual and lovable protagonist. i mean a romance from the perspective of a 30 year old man is already a real rarity, which is why i earmarked this to read in the first place. sara is a good foil, bubbly and fun and friendly, but secretly sort of dysfunctional about this stuff too. sheâs lovable and her frequent fuck-ups with regard to their relationship are never too egregious or irritating so as to be off-putting, but rather understandable, especially given that we have significantly less insight into her thought process than sekineâs. once again, my favorite thing, which is adult characters making reasonable adult decisions. which is not to say good decisions, just, you know, ones where you can follow the logic. this was so refreshing and different and genuine.Â
things i didnât like: this did run up against the very edge of my tolerance for misunderstanding and poor communication keeping people apart in romance comics over and over, where youâre just shrieking âif you would simply talk to one anotherâ at the page. ultimately it was worth sticking with, but it did try my patience a bit towards, oh, the fourth volume. i also really loathed the romantic rival who inserts himself at first (it just really feels like sekine is going to have enough problems all on his own without someone else trying to sabotage him), but he does kind of become more interesting when you find out about his circumstances.Â
i would check this out if:Â youâre looking for a fresh and genuine and unusually emotional (i mean to say that it has an usual emotional feel to it, not that it is uncommonly emotional in and of itself, if that makes sense) josei romance.Â
i would avoid this if:Â you donât tolerate melancholy well, you are sensitive to scenes of coercive sexual content (not perpetrated by any of the main characters, but mild spoiler: some of sekineâs flashbacks of his early experiences are pretty troubling if youâre bothered by that kind of thing), you have even thinner patience than i do for romantic misunderstandings keeping people apart.Â
