It can be difficult to keep a love story going once it gets more than a handful of volumes under its belt, particularly if you (correctly, in this case) don’t want to break up the main couple. Kazune Kawahara (writer) and Aruko (artist) in this volume of My Love Story!! are exploring another possibility, which provides a valuable contrast to the happiness of Takeo and Yamato. Takeo’s best friend Sunakawa is good-looking, so he gets plenty of attention from girls. […]

Everyone’s Getting Married is my favorite current manga romance, because it’s entertaining for me to see love among adults instead of schoolmates. It’s a cliche’ for the woman to want to get married before the man does, but I still like seeing Asuka and Nanami fall in love in spite of their different opinions on their eventual future. In Volume 2, Asuka admits her feelings for him, telling a friend she’s “going to try to persuade him to see things […]

In Idol Dreams volume 3, author Arina Tanemura spends more time with the adult Chikage, providing a nice balance to the previous volume. Chikage finally has the phone number of the guy she’s had a crush on since high school — thanks in part to her younger self. She even gets a date with him, but she’s so nervous she drags along Tokita, the guy who’s made her whole transformation possible. That’s him on the cover. Tokita, like the reader, […]

While Ten Count volume 1 established the characters and premise — OCD, germ-phobic guy meets a therapist who wants to help him — volume 2 remembers that it’s a yaoi manga and concludes with an explicit sex scene. Shirotani has quit coming to work, and his co-workers are concerned. Kurose, the counselor, told Shirotani that their work together is over, which sent Shirotani into a downward spiral. This volume opens with a dramatic re-meeting and some key revelations about how […]

The work-based stories begun in the previous volume continue here, as Soma takes on another internship, this time in the kitchen of a prestigious French-inspired chef (and former student at the same school). He’s opening a new restaurant in Tokyo, and he’s so demanding that his tastes exceed his budget, requiring his workers to take on all kinds of jobs to make an eventual quality experience for his customers. Working in an actual restaurant kitchen, with multiple tasks needing to […]

As a mature series, Master Keaton has settled into a groove that I find more enjoyable than I thought I would. That makes sense, since this volume seven is just past the halfway point of the eventual 12-volume Viz English run. (Assuming I’ve counted correctly. The Japanese series ran 18 books of 8 chapters each, but each translated volume contains 12 chapters, meaning that this volume 7 collects the original volume 10 and half of 11.) Each of these chapters […]

Ten Count, by Rihito Takarai and published by SuBLime, is the kind of yaoi manga I like — the kind with a plot beyond “let’s watch two cute guys make out”. In this case, it’s even based on a topic I’m immensely curious about. Shirotani is the assistant to a company president. He’s germ-phobic, to the extent of wearing gloves in daily life, and a compulsive hand-washer. He meets Kurose by accident. That’s fortuitous, because Kurose is a psychiatric counselor […]

I was about to give up on this series — I only read it for the food, and there are only so many times I can watch a cook-off — when this volume did something different that reignited my interest. But first, Food Wars volume 13 has to finish off the competition from the previous book, in which we find out whether Soma’s everyday cooking will make him the final champion of a tournament that began seven books ago. After […]