Strawberry-chan 1: The Gorgeous Life of Strawberry-chan

I found out about this series around the same time I got my hands on Jason Thompson’s manga guide.  I noticed it listed in with Ai Morinaga’s series in the back, and I was totally blown away that I hadn’t heard of it.  Up until about last month, the only thing I knew about it was its title, the fact there were two volumes released in Japan, and what the front cover looked like, which I only realized when I got it pointed to the frog as “Strawberry-chan.”  The description on the back that surfaced about a month ago didn’t help me figure out what it was about, but I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Ai Morinaga, so it was pretty much a must-buy for me.

It’s… composed of short chapters (usually around 10 pages) about a boy in boarding school and his pet frog.  They’re, uh, comedic in nature.  The first one is about how the boy loves to stick a straw up Strawberry-chan’s rear and inflate him like a balloon.  There are a number of other small tortures the boy inflicts on Strawberry-chan, but this one was the most… er, extreme.  Most of the others are psychological in nature.  We also find out pretty quickly that there’s a mutual love between Strawberry-chan and one of the boy’s roommates which delivers lots of sparkly shoujo moments between the boy and frog, and lots of opportunities for the owner to foil their pure love.  The frog-lover tries to adopt Strawberry-chan to get him away from his abusive owner… but apparently Strawberry-chan loves the straw torture too much.  At one point, a younger boy tries to get into the main character’s good graces so that he can be tortured like Strawberry-chan.  This goes many, many wrong places.

In short, this series is messed up in ways that you and I can’t begin to comprehend.  I loved it.

The chapters are gag after gag, so there’s not much in way of… plot or character to discuss, but I can vouch for how funny it is.  I wasn’t sure I was going to like it after the first few pages, but it kept getting weirder and weirder, and I just couldn’t help myself.  Strawberry-chan interacts with the boys (there’s maybe 4 who appear regularly, which seems like a good number) via thought bubbles, and the boys seem to mostly understand what he says.

I was totally won over by the end of the volume, which had a single panel that will haunt me for the rest of my life involving the straw joke, which isn’t all that overused for as many times as I’ve mentioned it here.  I laughed so hard I cried.  It’s very rare that I laugh out loud at a manga, Eroica being the only one that springs to mind immediately, but not even that one makes me laugh as hard as the end of this volume did.

To be fair, the joke I laughed hardest at made me think of Sgt. Frog a little bit, and I’m not too sure which one came first, but somehow it’s just funnier in this series.  Maybe because Strawberry-chan is just way more innocent.  I’m not sure why it works, it just does.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this isn’t for everyone.  It’s probably not even for most people.  But if you’re one of the few, you won’t regret buying this for a second.  Two volumes is probably about as much of something like this I can take… but the jokes kept getting better and better as the volume went on, so I’m dying to see what’s in the second volume.