Kare Kano vol.1 by Masami Tsuda

April 8, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized

Oh, wow… I remember this manga!  I absolutely LURVED IT in 6th grade… ah, that was the year things were always fun…  Anyway, on to the review.

Yukino Miyazawa is 15 years old and seems totally… flawless.  She gets the top grades in her class, all the boys like her, and she’s a star athlete.  But it’s all a facade!  Yukino just loves attention and popularity.  This would make her an unlikely shojo heroine (they’re all rather genuinely kind and plucky and joyful and… gag me…), but she’s really original and that makes her fun to read about.

But just when Yukino-san thinks that all is going well in her freshman year of high school… a plot device hits her in the form of Soichiro Arima, a suprisingly short-haired (thank the Lord he isn’t another long-haired bishie dude, although he is pretty cute for a manga character) smart guy who beats her by, like, 1/2 point in the entrance exam.  OH, HORRORS!  Yukino decides to get revenge…

…and it doesn’t work.  For starters, Arima seems to like her!  And then he finds out her secret: she’s not the perfect girl she’s cracked up to be.  Yukino realizes that she likes Arima… but it’s too late, he could never like her knowing who she really is… right?

The art is great and the plot is amazing, but what really drives Kare Kano is the characters.  The obsessive Yukino, nice-guy-with-bad-past (0.o) Arima, and the other characters introduced later (diminuitive Tsubasa is so cute/strange… a little like Hagu from Honey and Clover) make it a fun and engrossing read.  I urge you to pick up the manga today!