First volumes of Your & My Secret and Otomen: a hit and a miss

So I wrote a few days ago about the finale of Rinko Ueda’s Tail of the Moon, and now I’d like to take some time to review the very first volumes of two brand new (to me, at least) series, one of which I found thoroughly engaging and the other one … not so much.

First up: the initially promising yet poorly executed Otomen, by Aya Kanno. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so dissatisfied with this one if my expectations hadn’t been so high. Yet I’d heard and read so many glowingly positive reviews of this firs volume (the only one of the series yet to be published in English), that I just bought it on impulse, completely confident that it would be awesome. (Side note: manga is expensive, so I usually don’t purchase a volume unless I know it’s something I really need to own. That would include mostly continuations of series I’m already hooked on, or series I’ve previewed and researched online.) So anyways, I get home and get ready to be blown away, or at the very least to be amused and entertained. And I really did try to like it; I wanted to like it. Alas, it just wasn’t meant to be.

The concept of the series sounds fresh and interesting enough: a shoujo manga about straight guy Asuka who harbors a secret penchant for all things girly, and forms unlikely relationships with tomboyish girl Ryo and playboy Juta (who’s also got a few secrets of his own). Sounds like there’s lots of potential in there for humor and drama about the trials of coming to terms with oneself and one’s identity, right? Unfortunately, I saw none of that potential come to fruition in this book. I found the plot and dialogue to be un-stimulating and even repetitive, with the same basic scenarios and conversations rehashed multiple times throughout the volume. (And these guys’ lines aren’t particularly interesting to begin with.) The artwork is pleasing enough, but the characters themselves all seem pretty two-dimensional. I had to really push myself just to read through to the end of the volume, never a good sign. I know that many series improve as they go on, but they’ve got to at least keep up my interest in the meantime if I’m gonna stick around to find out. So it’s with a (relatively) heavy heart that I bid farewell to the slam dunk Otomen series I’d conjured up in my imagination, and pass this book on through the paperbackswap to somebody else.

Now reading the first volume of Ai Morinaga’s Your & My Secret, however, was a totally different story. Whereas Otomen completely failed to capture my interest, Your & My Secret drew me in almost instantly. The story features shy, quiet Akira Uehara, who it seems will never be brave or assertive enough to talk to the girl of his dreams. Especially since said girl, Nanako Momoi, although beautiful and elegent, is also incredibly rude, loud, pushy, and selfish. Poor Akira! There’s no way this girl would ever notice him, except maybe to steal his lunch money. Still, he’s hopelessly smitten, and so he pines from afar. Then one day, due to a series of Freaky Friday-like circumstances, the two get flung into each other’s bodies! You haven’t seen wackiness until you’ve witnessed Akira and Nanako wreaking havoc on their school trying to pretend to be one another. And you can bet their classmates are mightily stuck by the bizarre changes in these two. (Mostly they think the “new” Akira and Nanako are vast improvements over the original versions.) The laid-back Nanako seems to take it all in stride, even enjoying the advantages of being a boy, but poor Akira is having a terrible time of it. Confusion and hilarity ensues, and it’s all very entertaining. And I haven’t even said anything yet about all the gender confusion that goes on in our main love – rectangle? Diamond? Dodecahedron? It’s anyone’s guess at this point.

I’ve never read anything by Ai Morinaga before, although I know she’s got some pretty successful series to her name, and so far I’m really impressed. She manages to capture and keep this reader’s attention, and to leave me eager to find out how the story will continue to unfold in the next installment. The artwork is really nice, too, just the combination of detail, cuteness, and animation that I like. Morinaga does a super job of portraying motion; the drawings all seem very lively, whereas I found Otomen to be pretty, but sort of stiff. So, yeah, I’ll definitely be checking out Your & My Secret vol. 2.