Crown of Love 1

Yun Kouga – Viz – 2010 – 4 volumes

So I’m looking up this work to see how many volumes it has, and I see that Yun Kouga has two similar works, one called Renai, and another one called Renai Crown.  Ironcat licensed Renai a number of years ago (but didn’t release it), and from what I can tell, it sounds like the same series as this one.  Kouga mentions herself she tried the storyline out before drawing Renai Crown, but I’m a little surprised that they sound… nearly identical.  Also, Renai is an Akita Shoten title and Renai Crown is Shueisha?  There’s also ten years separating them, Renai is from 1989 and Renai Crown seems to be from 1998 or 99.  It’s… kind of weird that Ironcat had a Yun Kouga license.

Yun Kouga.  On one hand, I really like Gestalt.  For a variety of reasons, it seems few people enjoy that series the way I do.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, I really hate Loveless, which has a huge following and a lot of fans.  But she does do fine work, and I think a shoujo series like this one is a good show of her talents.

Kouga does do awkward subtlety of emotion well, and she also has nice art, two excellent reasons to like her.  Crown of Love seems like the same old shoujo plot, with a boy who falls in love with a celebrity and joins show business to chase her, but in Kouga’s hands, it becomes a more quiet and subdued story.  There’s no comedy, something the stories like this always have, and you can feel Tajima’s earnestness as he chases Fujio and is brutally rebuffed.  There’s a lot of raw emotion on display here, including Fujio’s honest feelings of unease and dislike for Tajima and a girl in Tajima’s class who pursues him despite knowing he’s in love with Fujio.  There’s also a manager, the man who got Fujio’s career off the ground and recently scouted Tajima, who complicates matters by being a magnet for Fujio’s affection and also the main point of contention between she and Tajima.

But with all the emotion, the honestness, and earnestness on display, the series is also surprisingly drama-free so far.  It’s unusual, but the characters seem to accept each other’s feelings, then try and figure out ways of dealing with them like a human being, something I like this series for immensely.

In addition to the lovely, humor-free and drama-free emotion we get here, I also enjoyed the mood and setting, something that’s aided immensely by the artwork.  Usually Kouga’s artwork is a little more sparse, and I sometimes dislike her character designs for being too similar to one another, but none of those problems are present here.

I feel like I need another volume in order to form a proper opinion of the series, but I really, really liked what I saw here.  It seems like it might be a shoujo series like We Were There, with serious stuff, a limited cast of characters, little humor, and nothing much else to complicate the plot.  Hopefully the showbusiness aspect won’t overwhelm things here, but the characters are already drifting back to school, and Tajima still hasn’t been approved for his new job, so there are any number of paths the series could take.  While I feel it’ll take one more volume to get a proper bead, I am looking forward to said volume.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.