Manga Review: Koko no Iru Yo

Title: Koko no Iru Yo
Author: Tooyama Ema
Release: Monthly
Status: Finished
Genre: Shoujo, Romance
Art: A
Originality: A
Story: B
Characters: B
Humor: B
Action: A

Impression: This is about a shy young girl named Sumino Hikage who runs a blog and wishes to become more noticeable to her classmates as her presence barely registers to them. On her blog are two followers who cheer her on at her attempts to change herself and because of them she keeps trying to have a normal conversation with her classmates. One day, while she’s taking care of the lone sunflower out in her schoolyard, the two most popular guys in her class drag her into a game of tag and she hears one of them call out her name properly and this cheers her up significantly. After a series of events, he confesses to her and they start getting close to each other and this brings the ire of several members of the guy’s fanclub and she now faces being bullied by these girls because she’s getting closer to him. I would have given the characters score an S+ if I was just basing it on the main character but when I put in the rest of the characters I’m forced to put a B. Sumino is quite an adorable character that makes it really easy for readers to want to cheer her on but everyone else is boring and are the stereotypical shoujo manga characters that can be found everywhere. The story itself is quite predictable and it becomes a bit dull when the love rivalry comes out in the latest scanlations so I’m hoping the remaining untranslated chapters will be as good as the first few were.