Love X Dilemma T15 - Edition simple

ドメスティックな彼女 [Domestic na Kanojo] #15

by Kei Sasuga

With entrance exams finally over, Natsuo officially becomes a college student. Now living on his own for the first time, a world of change awaits him. New friends, new experiences, and new challenges. Meanwhile, Hina moves back home. With so many intertangling elements, the chaos is sure to continue!

Genres: Manga, Romance, Shonen, Young Adult, Comics Manga, Japanese Literature, Graphic Novels

Kindle Edition

First published September 15, 2017

About the author

Kei Sasuga (流石景, Sasuga Kei) is a japanese mangaka.

Reviews

[Jon Ureña]

Four and a half for its genre.

Right after the last volume I reviewed, what I had been hoping that would happen did: the protagonist, Natsuo, realized that he had been rejecting best girl Rui because he didn't want to suffer again the horrible pain he had experienced after his last ex left him, but that way he'd be sacrificing the best person in his life. Fortunately, Rui had decided to keep true to her feelings instead of just settling for the orbiting douche, so the protagonist and her became a couple. These two kids make the nicest, sweetest pair. With all the madness in the world, I would read dozens of chapters with just these two living their lives together. The sequence I recall the most is when they embarked on a trip to a frozen northern region of Japan for the winter holidays. Natsuo's maybe biggest strength, which is also his weakness, his need to save others from their suffering, essentially solving their problems for them, makes him give away his hotel reservation to a toxic adult couple that had forgotten to make a reservation and now were stranded with a crying kid. However, that leaves Natsuo and Rui stranded in a town apparently devoid of shelter. They almost die in a blizzard, but they end up getting saved by the elderly owner of a rustic hostel.

When Japanese stories tend to involve high schoolers as protagonists, the natural end for the story tends to coincide with them graduating; Japanese high schools are tremendously strict: not only they demand a high level of competence from their students, but they are expected to attend on saturdays (I don't know if all of them), and to join clubs. It's a common plot point for Japanese stories in that setting that some club doesn't have the required 5 members to become official, receive money and secure a room, and when they do, they have their own space in which they can do whatever they want away from adults. In any case, the main characters in this series graduate. Rui won't go to college, as she's already working as a chef, but the protagonist will study Literature in a prestigious university, and through it he'll try to make sure that his awards as a novelist weren't flukes. He even moves away from home. It will be interesting to witness how the main characters, who got tangled in a new family, deal with becoming full blown adults; particularly in a story that deals heavily with how disappointing and difficult adult life tends to be.

The biggest development of this part of the series has to do with Hina, the protagonist's former girlfriend, a 25 year old that had fled home to teach at a rather remote island in order to escape the fact that her relationship with the then 17 year old protagonist had been found out. Her inability to properly deal with consequences is a big weakness in someone who already has plenty of them. Turns out Hina comes back home out of the blue for Christmas, during a time when Rui had gone to Italy to study under some famous chef. She's as fake cheerful as ever, and acts towards the protagonist as a big sister. Although she believes herself, or so she pretends, to have become accustomed to adult life, she botches everything she does at home: ruins the meals and clumsily passes out naked after a bath, off the top of my head. It doesn't take much for her to confess to her mother, in tears, that she's felt horribly lonely away from home, that it's too hard, and that she hates being a teacher. She begs to be allowed to quit her career and come back to the safety of her former life. In a significant way, Natsuo's, the protagonist, decision to move away to his own apartment stems from his unwillingness to share a space again with this mess of a step-sister and former girlfriend, who had torn his heart apart. In some of the most pathetic, in a sad way, moments I've read recently, when the protagonist had fallen asleep after Christmas dinner, Hina kisses him while fantasizing that he'd wake up and proclaim how much he had missed her, and that he wanted to love her again. But he doesn't, and we get a shot of Hina crying with her lips pressed against his. And worse, when she was leaving back to her island, knowing that in a few months she'd be back for good, she slipped a note to Natsuo that said "wait a little longer", even though he no longer wants anything to do with her. I can see this poor girl ten years later, having failed to find love and start a new family, crying herself to sleep after another drunk afternoon, exhausted from some pointless, poorly paying job.

Hina has become for me the most compelling example of a failed, stranded and hopeless adult since Tatsuhiro Satou from the brilliant Welcome to the NHK, and he was a full-blown hikikomori. Hina fails at everything: she considers herself to be a terrible teacher, she can't cook anything, she's clumsy, what she believes to be a good level of English gets proven false after many failed job interviews, etc. However, her worst trait is how she bottles up negative emotions and hides them behind a forced smile in order to pretend that everything is fine. She has been from the very beginning more of a child than any surrounding character. That also involves having started out in a relationship with a married man (a former teacher of hers, incidentally), and also that she decided that having a relationship with her stepbrother, a student of hers, was a good idea. This scene from the third episode is one of the first instances in which things began to go deeply downhill for this poor woman. As this volume ends, we have her barging in drunk into Natsuo's apartment to kiss him and proclaim that she still loves him (and implicitly that she regrets having fled when things got dangerous); meanwhile, Natsuo's actual girlfriend was hearing all this from behind the bathroom door.

I'm afraid that this story will go the route of having the protagonist lie too many times to sustain the relationship with best girl. It started with refusing to tell Rui that her sister had come home from the holidays (in order to avoid worrying her), then not telling her that Hina had visited his apartment, and saying that he had bought a new phone when Hina was the one who did it (presumably to butter him up). Let it end well for once.

This series is one of the best romantic comedies/dramas/slice of life that I've experienced in a good while, probably my favorite since Toradora. I'm somewhat worried about the anime, though, given that some of the animations aren't very fleshed out, and the music choices are questionable, particularly in the fourth episode.

[Laura ☾]

Okay it's official, I can't stand Hina. She's so much trouble. For God's sake. Leave the boy alone.. Ugh

[Eke]

a star off for the ending because like, can she MOVE PLEASE 😤

[CJ - It's only a Paper Moon]

I actually think this manga is at its worst when it shows Natsu as some sort of babe-magnet and then we just get a bunch of fan service and horrible and unbelievable plots.

It picked up toward the end.

[Paola]

Arg, Hina is so annoying... get over him already! Leave him alone...

[Edward]

Nat-kun got his own apartment. Rui got a way to visit him once or so per week. Nat-kun got dragged to a "Pink bar" thing where he met a past freind who was about to turn into a whore. He got her to not do that with help of a apartment complex guy who is / was a bouncer at them. Then once home he modified the story for Rui's ears but then Hina came back all drunk like and kissed Nat-kun then the book ended.
It looks like in volume 16 there will be more drama between the sisters and Nat-kun.

[Craig Schorling]

This was a pretty good volume. It had some really grounded moments. My favorite was the one with Momo and the confession that she receives. Hina is set to throw a wrench into the machine and I'm bummed by that as I do not like here character much anymore. I wish she would develop differently at this point but I don't see that happening.

[Brevin]

This is pretty much what I wanted the last volume to be

[Kieran Little]

The final moments of happiness before everything goes to shit again, tbh though I’m routing for Hina.

[Guillermo Schmitter]

Sin duda es un gran manga me gusta como aborda muchas cosas, hasta el momento ningún tomo defrauda

[Dumb popcorn's manga]

Fuck you Hina fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou

[Cedric Koon]

A really good read

Great story development. One of the better volumes and chapters. Some of the previous volumes are flat but lead in well to this volume

[JayLando22]

I was up the night before thinking of all the ways the story could fall off the rails for the sake of "drama". I appreciate Sasuga's choices lately where it is still compelling but not what I was expecting.

This one has the "MC harem" problem of making Natsuo too great and loveable to everyone else for some reason. Otherwise, moving to post-school is interesting because it requires what this is to change. College, new characters, new jobs, etc... all feel true to the story while also a light reinvention.

Hina as a character has always been problematic but for all her faults I am still sympathetic and it is the empathetic writing that does it. That cliffhanger can go so wrong though. This is a series that has to be taken volume by volume. I am always nervous that the whole thing is just going to fall off a cliff.