With their suits well and truly thrown away, Haru and Hinoto adjust to island life. But living in paradise still comes with a price tag and it may be one that they’re ill-equipped to afford. Especially when they want to get married to boot.
This is going to sound especially curmudgeonly of me, but this story doesn’t actually have any stakes. Like, okay, there’s Haru’s precarious mental health about having to live in the city, but even that is mostly related to job hunting.
The island has many job opportunities that require a college degree, which they are a year away from getting. I know it seems like a lot, but in the grand scheme of life, the universe, and everything, it is a drop in the bucket.
They could literally stick it out for a year together, support one another, then run away AND have good job prospects. I get that they don’t want to go back, but I also think getting a degree, when you’re that close (even if you’ll never use it), is kind of smart.
That’s just me, and I am not this story, but it does make me think this is a lot less dire than it seems except for them potentially flushing all that effort away. They also don’t have a budget, have only lined up work for a month, etc. It just doesn’t work when the characters are literally manufacturing their own crisis.
It’s hard to stay invested when there is an obvious solution that isn’t actually that bad that the leads just turn their noses up at. They talk about being trapped in an endless cycle, but they just work themselves to the bone in a warmer climate this volume. What’s better?
When they’re checking the job listings and Haru’s biggest concern about the job listing she’s found is that it looks fun, I feel so disconnected from this story that it’s practically coming from another dimension adjacent to mine.
It might just be the cultural differences between the stereotypical Japanese working environment and our own. A job you enjoy does count for a lot, but you also need to be able to live on something other than the good graces of your relatives.
This is a narrative about cutting off your nose to spite your face and I just cannot get around it (if it wasn’t wildly obvious). The romance is also overly dramatic at times; that omake felt particularly eye-rolling and an attempt to shoehorn in some sexual content.
Sometimes the story does okay, these two are always there for one another, but nothing about it is all that interesting and the story is a highway of obstacles that passes a ton of unencumbered off-ramps as they go by.
Not surprisingly, it’s a… wait for it… three volume series. That means this all needs to wrap up next time, but, if I’m honest, I’m not sure I’ll even bother seeing it through to the conclusion. There’s so little here if you apply any common sense to it.
2.5 stars - occasionally decent is about as rousing a cheer as I can give this, but all its drama is undercut by the fact that the characters are intent on ignoring an obvious solution that is nowhere near as bad as they make it out to be.