Mitsumi is leaving the village life behind for the high-octane halls of a prestigious Tokyo high school. With her whole life mapped out and an exaggerated grasp of her own abilities, she’s about to learn that the problem with maps is that they leave out a lot of the important little details sometimes…
Here’s a book that’s odd and endearing and oddly endearing. If you like fish out of water stories, especially ones where the fish has grossly overestimated her life skills and ability to function in a much larger pond, you will love this book.
By the time we’re mere pages in and have seen Mitsumi’s ludicrously detailed life plan and she has a wonderfully cliche ‘train leaving the village’ scene that is immediately derailed I had a hunch we’d be in for something special.
Poor Mitsumi has the worst first day of school one could possibly imagine and I love how we get such a clear picture of what she is and isn’t as a character, but she shows her chops intellectually even as she’s fumbling at everything else. I think the book is good to not make her a total mess, though I was feeling the anxiety and cringe at the start.
Amazingly, there are no less than four distinct female characters in this book and they are all really interesting. Beyond Mitsumi, we have the hot girl in class, who is mercifully not the mean girl nor at all what you would think she is.
There’s also the socially awkward girl, who ends up having a lot more depth than just shame and loathing of others. And even our resident mean girl has reasons for why she’s such a pain - a classic try-hard who feels if she isn’t standing out she isn’t anything and doesn’t quite care what she’s stepping on to make herself important.
All this and I haven’t even mentioned Sousuke, our male lead, yet. He’s a real breath of fresh air, being lighthearted and nice without the usual snark we have bolted on to these sorts of guys. I mean, he did get issued the standard fraught backstory, but even that seems a cut above the norm in terms of interesting. Great chemistry with Mitsumi as well.
And this book’s politics seem oddly ahead of the curve too. From a male drama senpai showing up in heels and nobody batting an eye to the suggestion (or error of translation?) that Mitsumi’s aunt is either a very tall woman or a trans man, there’s a lot of throwaway extra going on here.
It’s almost impossible to go over everything this book is doing and how rushed it doesn’t feel. Mitsumi keeps in touch with her old friends, which is awesome, and as somebody who also graduated in a small class in a small town and then went to a place for secondary school that was roughly 280x the size, I feel like her struggle is depicted rather accurately.
Later in the book, she gets a hell of a wake-up call that being the top dog in your own school and on entrance exams means absolutely nothing when you’re thrown into a group where everybody is just as smart and just as motivated. I remember getting my first exam results back in university and being blindsided by that exact bit of knowledge. This book doesn’t have its head in the clouds - it knows life and shows that constantly.
4.5 stars - I don’t love the art but I love everything else. I could seriously go on for another few paragraphs at how much I enjoyed this first volume, but my five star rating will have to do it for me. It is a strong, strong start to a book that you can kind of realize is special even as you read it.