Hitoma IrumaCritiques

This just felt...off. The whole volume feels like little snippets of at least 3 different volumes pasted into one; I had to stop reading at one point and double check that this was the first book and I wasn't missing something. The characters are vastly underdeveloped and have no personality outside of liking to skip classes. Also, I found it incredibly weird that part of the plot (which is already very skimpy) is that a teenage girl is jealous of a literal child (a 9/10 year old?) and is, in her mind, "competing" against the kid for her love interests attention.
Very meh all around so not a series I'm going to keep reading.

Years ago, I'm talking almost 20 years at this point, there was a few scanlation groups who did mystery-thriller type manga like this one. Storm im Heaven, MangaScreener, etc. Many of which were single volume or only a few volumes, not too long and easy to finish on a slow day at the school computer lab.

I loved those and despaired when it became less common.

I heard about this because of the live action film based on it (Usotsuki Mii-kun to Kowareta Maa-chan: https://asianwiki.com/A_Liar_and_a_Broken_Girl), which I still have yet to see, stars the guy who played Kimihiro in the live action xxxHOLIC series.

It would be a mistake to take everything on face value here. Mii-kun is the very definition of "unreliable narrator", though as it turns out the lies he tells are far more complicated than the truth.

Mii-kun has three goals - protect Maa-chan (from herself and others), "fix" the kidnapping that occurs and end the murders plaguing the city. All of which could end horribly at any moment due to Maa-chan's instability and Mii-kun's inability to act.

Honestly I enjoyed this and am happy to have been able to read it finally.

Oh if the manga-ka seems familiar, they're also responsible for 'Bloom Into You'.

Iruma writes an ending to a series that he plans on continuing because he thinks he may die before the series is finished. He then tells you to buy his new series Bloom Into You: Regarding Saeki Sayaka. A hilarious punchline but the setup of the joke was too tedious to be entertaining.

Will the advice of a fortune teller and the motivational lyrics of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” get Adachi out of Shimamura’s friendzone and into her love zone?

An otherwise cute story and a happyish ending for a troubled... well, not really protagonist.

On re-reading the piece this week however, I was struck by one thing that I realised really bothered me. During Sayaka and Edamoto’s first encounter, there is the following interchange:

“Why don’t you come visit sometime, Sayaka-senpai? We can have tea and, umm….” Edamoto-san glanced at her shopping bag, “…I can offer you some bean sprouts.”
“That’s a pairing I’ve never tried before.” I attempted to picture myself eating bean sprouts between sips of tea, but my imagination wasn’t up to the task.

On the surface it sounds like an innocuous rib on how silly Edamoto can be. But in fact it disturbs me when I was awake enough to realise I’ve actually had this pairing often. We have a great many Korean restaurants in my city and bean sprouts are a very common banchan, which are often served as an appetizer. Thus if you enjoy Korean food, you may very well be just eating sprouts and sipping tea on occasion. Iruma seems to be suggesting the idea is just absurd.

What worries me is that I can’t tell if Iruma is trying to indicate that although she acts mature, in fact Sayaka is still very young and inexperienced in the real world; or if Iruma herself is making anti-Korean disparaging commentary… or if the racism I interpret is (ironically) purely accidental on the part of the author. And if it is the latter, could it be possibly be a unconscious learned attitude rooted in Japanese xenophobia and millennia-old anti-Korean sentiment?½