Volumes 1-3
Story and Art by Yoshizumi Wataru
Copyright © Yoshizumi Wataru

After a short two volume series KIMI SHIKA IRANAI and an extended vacation after the completion of MARMALADE BOY, Yoshizumi Wataru is back! Her latest series, MINT NA BOKURA, is a light romantic comedy aimed at a younger audience than her previous works.
Currently up to three volumes with more to come, this latest offering revolves around a pair of 13-year-old twins, Noeru and Maria, and the various love polygons that occur around them. Those of you familiar with Yoshizumi's other works may be expecting plenty of angst and teary confrontations, but Yoshizumi herself has professed to be rather exhausted from the intensity of those types of stories, and has instead elected to keep this series as fun as possible.
Noeru and Maria are as close as two siblings could possibly be, and Noeru loves his elder sister to something of an extreme. So, when Maria falls head over heels in love with a boy from another school and transfers to that school to be closer to the boy, Noeru is struck by confusion and jealousy. To make things worse, it is a boarding school which Maria has moved out and now the two of them will no longer be together. There is only one solution—transfer to Maria's new school himself and persuade her to come back!
That sounds very simple—until Noeru is informed that the only opening left is in the girls' dormitory. Refusing to be deterred by this minor inconvenience, Noeru masquerades as a girl and begins life at Maria's new school...
The story focuses mainly on Noeru and the hijinks that crop up as he tries to adjust to having a cute girl as a roommate, as well as when Maria, more than a little annoyed at Noeru's unreasonable persistence, refuses to cooperate at all. Not least of Noeru's problems is his new best buddy, whom Noeru keeps forgetting still thinks of him as a girl. As the story progresses, more and more characters appear and things begin to get quite complicated for Noeru and his little secret.
Yoshizumi's art is, as usual, excellent. Her fine lines and admirable consistency, as well as her knack for the dynamic, raise this series above the rest of the crowd. The characters in MINT NA BOKURA all tend to be very young, and correspondingly the art is cuter and more childish than normal. There are plenty of instances of SD (super-deformed, when a character's body shrinks and their facial features become simplified) that make for some very funny moments.
Unfortunately, while this setup makes for easy reading, it fails to grip and hold the reader like Yoshizumi's previous works. In playing up the comedy aspect, Yoshizumi has sacrificed what made MARMALADE BOY and KIMI SHIKA IRANAI such memorable manga—intensity. While the situations that she put her characters in were admittedly outrageous, they were dead serious about their emotions, and Yoshizumi herself treated each character with care and love.
However, in the case of MINT, whether it is because the characters' concerns seem a little too childish, or because Yoshizumi herself does not take them too seriously, the end result is a manga that is fun to read, but not one where you would be immersed in the storyline. Noeru, with his capacity for acting before thinking and his ignorance of the potential consequences of his actions, can be downright annoying at times. Love polygons are either resolved right away, or get dragged on because of some petty misunderstanding. Still, in MINT's defense, in the context of things this is only to be expected; the characters are after all children, and the primary audience of this manga is grade or middle school.
In conclusion, MINT NA BOKURA is a good fun manga which will appeal to most people, but personally I was looking forward to something a little closer to the acclaimed Yoshizumi Wataru's forte of teenage angst and romance. In switching the role of comedy from a supporting aspect to the main feature, she seems to have lost some of the focus and power that we have come to associate with her.

Published by Shueisha (Ribon Mascot Comics)
3 volumes out, ongoing
175 pages; Black and White
volume 1: ISBN4-08-856058-2
volume 2: ISBN4-08-856099-X
volume 3: ISBN4-08-856125-2
¥410 each
Available now in Japan
Where to buy