狼少年は今日も嘘を重ねる The Boy Who Cried Wolf Tells a Lie Today Also

The Boy Who Cried Wolf Tells a Lie Today Also (Ookami Shounen wa Kyou mo Uso wo Kasaneru) begins with Keitarou Itsuki a junior high school student unhappy about the menacing look of his eyes. Keitarou tries to confess to the girl he likes, Aoi Tokujira, but she rejects him flat out. Thinking that his eyes were the reason why she rejected him, he confides in his older sister about it at her salon, who helps by giving him a complete makeover, into a pretty girl! Forced to head home like this, he runs into Aoi in town, who doesn’t recognize him and asks him to help her overcome a problem she’s had for many years: an intense fear of men, androphobia.

It’s a manga about crossdressing! Anything that’s crossdressing makes my eyes light up, plus the art’s good! So I gave it a try.

Plot-wise, there isn’t anything much to be expected. No surprise feels, no teary moments. But at some points, it really touched my heart. How the main character could go all out to help Aoi overcome her androphobia, and not merely due to love. Aoi’s past is remarkably a captivating read, the feelings, the emotion are all well conveyed even in round and perfectly cute art.

It has been a really good read, and I can’t really place my finger on exactly why, but it could be due to how the character’s come to terms with the resolution, it’s a bittersweet end, Botan gets what she wants in the end, and Aoi changes and is no longer as cold as a thorn princess… but it was still disappointing to have ended in such a way. Perhaps it feels off and incomplete since all the last chapter showed was a rather slice-of-life situation, without a proper development of love of the final selected couple, but I guess the way it ended off is a way to end as well.

 

In comparison to the other mangas I have read so far, this one does itself well to appear to be a bittersweet, perfectly packaged romance fairy tale that doesn’t end off all to well. It’s a realistic ending since we don’t have major turnovers that the writer just pulls out of his butt to give the readers what they want, but at the same time leaves things to be desired since the fairy tale doesn’t seem to have ended of perfectly happy. Aoi has things left unsettled, her phobia of boys not completely cured, but the thorn princess having been resolved, and her love unfulfilled. While Botan seems to be the happiest of the pack, her relationship with the hero hasn’t progressed by far, and to be completely blunt, they would seem to be only slightly off the track of friendship. Nevertheless, the story ends here abruptly to complete the short fairy tale, of the boy who cried wolf and the thorn princess of the library.

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A delicious read that leaves much to be desired.

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