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Saho He vowed to take revenge on the beautiful man. Her determination to live her life without love confuses and frustrates her friends, and she’s sure that no matter what life throws at her, her iron law will stick. But when life throws the hottest member of Japan’s biggest idol group into her small family restaurant, it turns out that Saho may not have all the fixes she thinks she has. In the face of an all-out charm offensive, can her stubbornness survive?
| My Special One |
Adapted by translator with polished letters by Adrienne Beck and Brandon Bovia.
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300 300 Koda Momoko 100 seems to focus on only
This side is a general feeling. She had seen works in English translation before, which also had a heroine, and she was stuck in a state of how she thought things should be. The heroine of this work, Saho, has the opposite problem from the protagonist of the previous work: she was once hurt by a beautiful man she had a crush on, and since then she believes that all beautiful men cannot be trusted. She often cursed them to be fat and bald. Of course, that means she has a run-in with the hottest guy J-Pop 300 The idol came to her family restaurant looking for home cooked meals. Her fear of realizing who he is is compounded when he thinks she’s his fan. It’s not that he’s having a hard time making that assumption; given his celebrity status, it’s hard to imagine him meeting that many girls who want him to sign for a friend rather than for himself. But when he turned on Idol Charm, Sabo was furious and immediately started berating him. At first, she felt very self righteous about it, but when she looked back, she realized he was crying, which gave her the first of many hints that maybe even pretty men are human.
This is the strongest and weakest element of the book. It never seemed to Saho that boys were human beings like she was. Kouta’s initial reaction when he assumes she’s his fan does feel cross-border (he puts his arms around her shoulders and kisses her on top of her head, which is both bad and okay in the context of celebrity culture Understood), Saho’s early interactions with him seem a bit mean, and not just because his skin is paper thin. He does have an incredible sensitivity to the idea of himself doing something that someone doesn’t like, suggesting that there’s a lot more going on here than most other characters think. Kouta has an almost morbid need to be liked, and when we combine that with statements he makes about Saho and our glimpses of a middle school photo of him with a girl next to a bouquet on his desk, we Let’s start by assuming that he, like Saho, has something in his past that is affecting his present in ways he may not fully understand. For Kouta, it might be easier to be an idol for thousands than it is to be one guy’s boyfriend, and while that’s not unheard of in the genre, it does open the door for the story to begin to feel a lot more fair than the first Volumes suggest more than that.
Part of the problem with this volume is that Saho’s sudden switch to liking Kouta feels, well, suddenly. He was a good guy, but she changed her mind too quickly, at least partly because he was condescending to her. Even though Saho is passionate about her mistrust and dislike of attractive men, his charm offensive comes a little too quickly, destroying her character somewhat. It is true that she is a sixteen-year-old girl, and her life experience and perhaps her understanding of her emotions are limited. But for a girl who has always remembered her so-called iron law, suddenly left, it feels like the author doesn’t quite know how to deal with her change of heart, or at least want to get it sooner rather than later. Kouta’s charming condescension is almost certainly not something he himself is fully aware of; as the snide little author’s narration points out, much of his idol habits are largely the product of long-term membership in major idol groups. This suggests that the story line could have been more focused on two characters overcoming their learned behaviors, becoming more true to themselves, and finding lasting happiness; this is a romantic comedy that needs to be understated. But like Koda’s previous work, the whole setup feels a little off, as if certain transitions were left out, which makes things go bad.
I’ll give volume two because it’s not without potential. Koda is very familiar with the standards of comedy romance and can use them with ease. Yes, it can work more smoothly. But if you don’t like
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, you should think carefully about whether you want to pick up another copy by Book by the same creator, because while it’s a good enough book, it’s also a little off in the hard-to-determined way, and this issue also pops up in |
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