A Town Where You Live

Kimi no iru machi is a manga that will pass to history not because of its beauty, but cause of the original yet weird ideas from its mangaka. First one third of the manga was really enjoyable, quite a nice story between the two main characters developing a relationship while struggling with some typical high school problems and family issues. Romance on this part of the manga was really good, quite a cute story. After that is when the story took a very twisted turn. Perhaps as an attempt to make it more dramatic and interesting, the mangaka came up with a very interestingand original new love triangle. This might be the very first manga where the main character, Haruto a guy, gets stolen by his love rival; yeah, you heard me right, he, not his girlfriend, gets stolen by the other guy. I guess love lost against friendship on this part of the manga. If you have ever heard the phrase "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer," well, this manga took that phrase to a new level. Later on, after those events, the manga became a slice of life centered on what Haruto wanted to do in the future. I do enjoy slice of life mangas, but the problem with KNIM was that it was only in the perspective of Haruto, who was never such an interesting character to follow, and not to mention that the romance part was barely present and lost its quality. Haruto struggles for about half of the manga about what to do for a living, even did weird things that went completely against his character, like breaking up with his girlfriend for a random job he got, only to end up becoming, what was really clear since the very beginning of the manga, a chef. Art was really good, perhaps the only talent and strength of its mangaka, but even the art also lost a bit of quality towards the end. Towards the end, the heads of the characters had a weird shape at the top, they look a bit like the Coneheads but with hair. Charaters of KMIN, what can I said about them, they lack development. They fail to show any maturity at the end of the manga. I would even venture to say they were more mature at the beginning than at the end. Sure the mangaka came up with the really great idea to just make other characters say "yeah, you have grown" as prove of their development, but their actions still showed otherwise. Something very funny is how most people did not like the main characters at the end of the manga. The choices taken by the main characters were never that popular nor understood by the readers. Anyway, If somebody decides to venture and read Kimi no Iru Machi, I would suggest read just the first one third of the manga, when they become an official couple, and then drop it and just read the final chapter. And if you do that just ignore the helmet at the end.

There's probably one question that you'll continue to ask yourself in this series. How is this guy so popular with the ladies? Story This is a manga about the relationship between our central characters Haruto, a country bumpkin from hiroshima, and Yuzuki, a city girl from tokyo. Basically the story is about how Yuzuki comes into Haruto's life and causes a bunch of problems for him. Say for example, Haruto has a crush on a girl, she will clumsily get in the way of that in a rather silly fashion. However despite the interference, Haruto can't help but not leave her alone. Overall the firstpart of the story is relatively decent I must say in terms of shounen romance plots. Nothing is terribly original, but it's paced well and the setting helps keep the story a little fresh. However this only occurs for the first part. Without spoiling anything the story is branched into 4 seperate arcs. While the first is relatively strong, the remaining 3 are where the series heads down hill. The second arc for example introduces some very illogical drama. Now to be fair, the characters are young and inexperienced so this kind of behavior can be expected. However the problem is, none of the characters ever explain their actions, and none of them ever seem to grow from them. It makes the characters lack layers and makes it difficult to sympathize with them. The following 2 arcs are mainly filler as the core story is done after the second arc. Mostly filled with fanservice and plot threads that seem like they might build up to something good, but never really go anywhere. This part of the manga is obviously for people who really like to see a couple be together. As fanservice, it is passable at times. But it's dragged out far too long, making the series become rather static and boring. I wouldn't mind it being a straight slice of life if it had been that way since the beginning. The final arc even proceeds to have a very cop out ending which I am very much against in story telling. So all in all, it started out decent and then tinkered off and became rather lifeless. Characters The characters are fairly decent at first. Not that they are terribly interesting, but still semi-believable. The main problem is how their growth is handled. It's never apparent to the audience that the main characters are growing up in any fashion, but other characters might have to point it out for you. This is against the "show but don't tell" aspect of storytelling and it makes it seem like the manga is trying too hard to prove that it actually developed it's characters. It will also use time skips liberally to tell you that characters have developed off screen, which would be ok as long as we got to see some of the development. The biggest problem is of course the handling of the side characters. Not only are most pointless, but there are far too many, and little respect is given to them. Keep in mind that everything in this manga takes place from Haruto's perspective. So we never get to see any of the characters outside of their time interacting with him. This can be done well, if you limit the amount of characters and focus the time well on the main lead. But here it just feels like an excuse not to develop any of them properly. Funny enough, most of them develop far more than our main leads technically. However it's all done offscreen and we never get to see any of it. Also some characters just blatantly get written out of the story, which shows that the author hardly even cares about most of them. Most of the women are introduced as just harem fodder unfortunately. It seems that no matter what, whenever Haruto goes to something new in his life (new college group, job hunting, part time job, etc) a new girl will be waiting. Unfortunately with the combination of the first person perspective and the fact that they are given very limited chapters, it just begs the question on why they are introduced at all. Especially when Haruto is already in a relationship at these points so introducing further women to be distractions is all but pointless (as you can bet, every single one of them falls in love with Haruto). Now it's a common trait in harem manga to have a lot of girls. But that's most effective "before" the relationship starts, rather than after. Enjoyment Like said before. At first it was enjoyable, but then it just got downright boring for me. Though I can understand some people like couple chapters, but I still think it was done in supreme excess. Also not a big fan of cop out endings like said before, so the drama eventually just felt forced and pointless with no real meaning attached to it. Which would be ok if it was entertaining, but I can't really say I feel that way about KNIM. Honesly there are better romance/ecchi manga's to waste your time on then this if you ask me.

tl;dr: A very well illustrated and very well written story about a relationship that gets really messy but becomes incredibly strong, and that does have some major rough edges but has a strong enough core to outshine them completely. Kimi no Iru Machi is a story that changes quite a bit, but at it's core its about the relationship between the two main characters, Haruto and Yuzuki as it goes through a lot of twists and turns over a pretty long period of time. It starts off as a pretty standard high school romance set in the country. There's some drama as there are some complexities tothe main characters relationships, but it's pretty lighthearted overall. The biggest problem the protagonist faces is their own lack of maturity and ability to understand and deal with their own feelings, as is standard for such manga. Still, while it's not particularly unique, it does do a solid job of developing the start of the relationship of the main couple. This lasts for about the first third of the manga. After that it changes quite a bit, with what is known as oft called the Tokyo arc. The best way to describe it is that it becomes a storm where things get incredibly intense and things change tremendously. This change is painful due to how the relationship in the main couple was already built up, especially as the manga does a good job at conveying Haruto's and Yuzuki's pain and how it influences their actions. It's well written with major twists and good pacing. Still, it does intentionally make a mess of things, which filled me with a sense of frustration strong enough that I actually dropped the manga here at one point before rereading it all again from the beginning later on after having watched the anime. And then the storm is suddenly over to the point it feels abrupt how quickly it ended, though how it ends certainly isn't happy ending. Still, while its done a lot of damage to the relationship between the main couple, it leaves things outside that very stable so the manga actually returns to being peaceful and pretty lighthearted. At this point the manga has introduced essentially all the main characters so it just casually develops the bonds between all of them as friends and sets the foundation for their circumstances which persists for the rest of the manga. It's decent at what it is, but while I was reading it it felt pointless due to the lack of the main relationship and heroine of the manga. But it turns out that was just the eye of the storm and things return to being chaotic once more, though its a bit strange in that you don't realize it's actually returned to being a storm until pretty much the end of this phase when it reaches it's climax. This arc is messy, even messier than the first part of the storm. Still, it felt like the messiness of it actually added to its value and helped further establish the value of the main relationship. I liked what it was doing here a lot more than I liked the first part or eye of the storm so to speak and in hindsight the direction that this takes the story and how it uses what was built up over the rest of the storm makes it feel like those parts had a lot of value in what they built up, even if I really didn't like them when I was reading them. The core of this part isn't really developing the relationship of the main couple, but rather going over it and reaffirming it by bringing a lot of what was built up before together and also showing how the two of them had grown. It's written incredibly well with by far the most powerful moments in the series with chapter 137, which as expected is critically important as one would expect considering it's named after the title of the manga itself, and chapter 141 also being incredibly memorable. This time things don't just completely drop on the intensity scale as in the opposite case of where things were left after the first half of the storm, now the main relationship is strong but everything else is in shambles. So while things aren't as intense as they were, there's a decent level of drama that persists for a while as things are rebuilt. Intermixed with that though, is just a couple doing couple things with a decent amount of fluff. Eventually it does reach a state of pretty peaceful equilibrium though. However, that occurs about 2/3s of the way into the manga. The majority of the rest of the manga is mostly just lighthearted fluff and comedic moments in a series of short episodes, with some parts even going to the level of ecchi gag manga. Still, it's good fluff, and with everything that had been built up up to this point I was heavily invested in these two's relationship, so even that fluff was really enjoyable with a lot of the simple happy moments or simple reminiscence to earlier events managing to be quite impactful. There's light drama here and there, but it's usually really short and quickly resolves, just feeling like minor squabbles than anywhere near the intensity of earlier events. The old characters are all still there and it adds a few new ones as well which ends up adding a decent variety to the short stories that keep things amusing even if it is mainly focusing on Haruto and Yuzuki. And though there's not a lot of major plot events for the main couple, quite a lot happens to the rest of the cast of characters with a lot of character and relationship development that also manages to be quite impactful, though that's somewhat of a double edged sword in that it results in feeling like some characters don't get enough time. It is also somewhat strange that while all this development is happening with everyone else, Haruto and Yuzuki feel like they're staying pretty static. Over the course of the manga Yuzuki already grew a lot and it becomes very evident during this part. Haruto seems to have already grown in aspects related to how he deals with relationships, which is very strong growth, don't get me wrong, and which leads to some cool moments during this portion. However, in matters outside of that it doesn't seem like he's grown at all, rather it even feels like he's regressed a bit, in that he simply goes with the flow and isn't very decisive regarding where he wants to go in life, which leaves him looking kind of lame. Then the manga reaches it's final arc, which to be quite frank it tremendously rushed. I feel the author was simply in a rush to start their next work, which literally began the same time the last chapter of this one was released. Still, this may have had it's advantages. It starts off immediately being kind of painful due to how strongly it had built up the main relationship, then proceeds into reaching a heart rending level of painful, and then suddenly reaches a happy ending. It was abrupt yes, but at the same time, I don't think I would have wanted it to remain painful and especially not heartrendingly painful for long, and I think I really would have hated it if it was dragged out. Still, it feels like we ended up missing a lot, including a lot of important events. The ending very much emphasizes Haruto's lame aspects of simply being dragged along by the flow and not willing to fight it, with the happy ending ultimately being achieved due to not his actions but things outside of his control rather than him fighting for it. However after that, in the time skip epilogue, he suddenly seems to be a very different character capable of doing what's necessary to achieve what he wants even if it results in things getting messy in that he does what he should have done long ago when he was heading towards a bad ending. How he got there is skipped over entirely and thus it feels like we missed the climax of his character arc. How rushed the ending was also results in it feeling like some side characters stories were pretty much left dangling without any closure. Still, despite it being rushed, I found the ending satisfying even if it isn't completely clear how it got to where it was because it did a good job of showing the most important things, and thus I I felt happy with it but I really felt like I wanted more of it as well, fluff and all. Lastly, the art is exceptionally good and used really well. In general the quality is high but certain panels and things like chapter and title covers are often amazing. It is kind of funny though that even though the level of quality is so high, the author can't seem to decide on various character's hair colors and they seem to be pretty inconsistent across different color pages and covers.

After having read Suzuka and really enjoying it, I went ahead and read A Town Where You Live, and Seo Kouji delivered something different but great again. To those who read Suzuka, it can seem very similar. For example; Suzuka is about a someone from Hiroshima that goes and explores Tokyo while ATWYL is someone from Tokyo coming to Hiroshima. Although they are the same in that aspect, it still tells an enjoyable story The characters in ATWYL are just great. The MC meets new people who are likeable and have different personalities. The characters who grew up with the MC are really great as well andhave very good synergy with not just the MC but with each other in a group. I really cared for the characters and felt invested with them because they all have their own goals and those who don't, push themselves to find their goals. Suzuka's themes and messages change throughout the story but ATWYL takes this to another level. This manga is romance story but it's also a coming of age story about the MC and his friends who try to figure out who they are as they do different things in the story which is something great. Just like Suzuka, this manga is not static and character motivations, struggles and relationships change quite often, probably more than Suzuka but it does not feel rushed in any matter and makes you become more attached to the characters since it feels really realistic. Although I don't think it's a problem, ATWYL has slightly less tension and suspense than Suzuka but when something negative or tense happens here, it does affect the story. I gave this a high score because this coming of age story really resonated with me and I enjoyed everything about it. Also for the Suzuka readers, there might be little moments that will grab your attention. In the end, if you liked Suzuka and enjoy a good romance manga and want to read a coming of age story that could perhaps resonate with you and leave you satisfied and with a smile, then A Town Where You Live is a definite must read for you, although I would read Suzuka first then ATWYL since the story takes place after it.