Dreamin’ Sun Volume 7

I should have given up on Dreamin’ Sun a while ago, because it’s just spinning its wheels. Zen likes Shimana, who likes their landlord, who doesn’t seem to like women. Repeat ad nauseum with various internal monologues full of questions from Shimana, who’s gone from being cute to being vapid.

Volume 7 begins with a chapter that seems to have come in from some other book. It’s finally explained by the end of the volume, but when I first started reading, I was even more confused than usual, because it features a new character in a flashback to earlier in Miura’s life. He’s the cop that hangs out with the landlord and has started meddling in everyone’s relationships (and that’s him on the cover). Starting the book with this digressive chapter, though, made me think I’d forgotten even more of the story than I have.

That opening chapter does indicate how many of the guys in this book deal with uncomfortable situations, though. “I just ignore things that are inconvenient for me,” he says, refusing to answer the girl with a crush on him. At the same time, he demands she be honest with other people. But very few of the characters in this series know what they really want, and to avoid that discomfort, they keep trying to do things based on other people’s emotions. For example, Shimana worries about whether she can make the landlord happy instead of trying to figure out whether she really loves him or if she even knows what a relationship should be.

Miura brings in a complicating factor here: the landlord’s father, who rightly points out that a twenty-something guy “dating” a just-turned-seventeen-year-old who lives in his house might be seen as a bad thing and affect his career. But then author Ichigo Takano gilds the lily by having him threaten to evict everyone because they’re all too low-class for his kid to hang around with, turning him into a cardboard villain.

I’ve realized with this volume that Dreamin’ Sun has become too incoherent for me. I don’t care about any of the characters, because they don’t behave like I think people do. There’s too much treading water, revisiting the same points over and over, and the main plot thread of the young girl trying to guilt the older guy into dating her has come to repulse me. I don’t want to spend time with the cast any more.