Haru yo, Koi

Despite the somewhat lighthearted tone, I consider this work a serious coming-of-age seinen romance manga, particularly exploring adolescent sexuality. With these premises, you shouldn't be reading it as a romantic romance drama, but a story focusing on the troubles coming along with sex and love, and how do people grow with these problems. The plot revolves around several adolescents who are not so experienced with love and sex encounter various situations relating to these themes. They are frequently stumbled by the difficulties caused by their immaturity; in the end, although they are heavily scarred, they learn from the pain and step towards the happy future. My problem withit, is that I feel the ending is a bit rushed; the main heroine deserves more plot.

First off - anyone reading this that is expecting it to be a yuri-centric manga, drop those expectations right now. The story clearly focuses on Takashi and his relationships with various women, including the main heroine Sae. Sae herself is obviously bisexual and her meeting with Takashi was through her relationship with Takashi's sister who is an experimenting lesbian. Other than that tenuous link and a few panels of ecchi drawings, the story does not focus on characters sexual orientations at all. That being said, this manga is pretty good. The art is nice and clear, with panels easy to follow and without overblown toneseverywhere making it hard to read or look at. The character designs are appealing, but sometimes it's difficult to differentiate some of the cast from background characters. On the down side, while the plot is pretty decent, the main protagonist Takashi is really a reprehensible fellow. He spends the first half of the manga being a philandering selfish jerk and his behavior will clearly infuriate you since it's clear that both Sae and Mariko care deeply for him. On the whole I say this is an above average seinen romance manga, I struggle to give it more praise than that. For some reason the emotional scenes didn't resonate with me that much and I would say that if you're looking for an adult romance manga, you'd probably be better off reading something like Hetakoi instead.

This manga seems to try to go for multiple arcs with only the main character as a common character between them, and each combination of characters having their own set of melodrama. The thing though, is that melodrama only works if you have well developed characters the reader is invested and interested in. Hence, this works pretty well for the first arc. Though to be honest, most of the characters weren't all that interesting here either, with Mariko feeling pretty flat, Mafuyu feeling fickle, and Takashi seemingly only being taken along for a ride. However, Sae was a pretty amazing character, going through quite a bit and bouncing back in various ways. Theway the arc ended was fair enough and hit a strong emotional note in me. However, the way things carried on after that was kind of weak. None of the new characters in the second arc, or what seemed to be another arc starting after that were all that interesting, or at least were a part of relationships that felt interesting. It was interesting to see Takashi apply wisdom he learned from the first arc and show that he had grown, but beyond that the new arcs never felt that interesting. Still, the author manages to pull things together for the ending, where while it did feel kind of forced, it managed to pull things back to focusing on the only thing that really was a strength in this manga, and present an ending that I was completely happy and satisfied with. Still, everything from the end of the first arc up to that felt pointless. The art was okay. tl;dr: A manga about relationships that has a good first arc but doesn't do well past that though it still does manage to end things well.