Kashimashi 1

So as the title suggests, I finished up Valentine’s day just before bed with some girl meets girl action (this makes me sound like a bigger loser than I actually am, I had a rather nice Valentine’s Day outside of reading manga, too) note: this makes no sense unless you saw that I posted, like, six reviews on Valentine’s Day, which is why I suggested I was a loser.  I was really wanting some translation notes with this one, and I remembered that Boogiepop was rather copiously annotated, but when I flipped to the back I didn’t see them.  I found them eventually, but there’s only about two pages of them, and at that point I didn’t remember what it was I wanted clarified.  The nicer thing in the back was a description of all the plants Hasumu talks about, which I was completely in the dark about.

I was kind of unsure I would like this series.  I did want it to just be a bizarre yuri series, but I knew that Satoru Akahori isn’t particularly known for his subtle jokes and serious-minded stories.  The description made it sound like that’s what this was though.  Much to my shock, it is a rather subtle romantic series with some jokes thrown in every now and again.  Some of the jokes aren’t subtle (I hated the inclusion of Jan-pu and the alien, which feel like they don’t belong), but for the most part we get a lot of awkward romantic moments and the characters exploring their feelings for each other in a rather… tender way.  I did not know that Akahori was capable of this, but here you go.

The series is really BIZARRE.  The main character is a boy who confesses his feelings to his love interest, and she shoots him down.  He goes up to where he met her in the mountains, where he gets hit by a spaceship.  Because they can’t just let him die, they rebuild him, but they mess up and he’s a girl when he gets rebuilt.  Turns out that the love interest is only interested in girls, and she really did like him, but now that he’s a girl, the two are a perfect match.  Hasumu, the main character, also has a next-door neighbor who he was best friends with.  This neighbor also had a big crush on him despite her tomboyish nature, and a rivalry springs up between the love interest and the neighbor.

It’s not the kind of rivalry you’d expect in this kind of series.  The only words the neighbor and love interest exchange is when the neighbor asks the love interest to back off since she really hurt Hasumu’s feelings when she rejected him and she thinks Hasumu’s still trying to get over this shock.  Hasumu isn’t sure what to do now that he’s a girl, but he feels like he should like boys now.  He’s still attracted to the love interest though, and she’s attracted to him, so there’s lots of romance there.  There’s also a lot of tension with the neighbor, who is also still attracted to Hasumu despite the fact he’s a girl now.  She struggles with whether or not she should still like him since he’s not a boy anymore, but largely comes to the conclusion herself that Hasumu is Hasumu, and nothing’s really changed about him.

It’s really, REALLY good so far.  There are some stupid jokes sprinkled about (whenever the teacher appears, she falls down, usually in a hole or something like that), but for the most part the jokes hit there marks and aren’t intolerable.  They kind of fit with the goofy, bizarre nature of the series, too.  I’m really liking the tender girl relationships right now too, as female relationship manga is not something that’s extremely prevalent in the US right now.  I’m really glad to see this series here, and I’m also really glad it is what it is.  I’m also really eager to see where it goes in future volumes.