[DeepL Translation - needs review] Volume 1: Kaede, a boy who was sexually assaulted in the past, is obsessed with becoming "normal"... A coming-of-age bitter story of boys with various problems such as love, sexual problems, and complexes. (Author: 46 / First published in GANMA!)
(Translator: DeepL)
Interested to see where it goes
Kaede, now a high schooler, was raped by a female teacher in junior high and developed a fear of being touched by women. He's desperate to move beyond his trauma and be seen as "normal", but just when he feels healed enough to express his wish to have a girlfriend (a normal girlfriend), he gets his chance when a stranger confesses that she fell in love with him at first sight!
Difficulty-wise, this feels middling. There is no furigana. The language is easy in that it's in a real-life school setting and the dialogue is not dense, but it's a bit more challenging in the amount of slang the teenage characters use and the vocabulary that comes up in the discussions of PTSD and sexual assault. However, I found those discussions quite frank, and there wasn't really any instances of characters being vague or talking around it in a way that was confusing or hard to understand.
I enjoyed this first book, but it felt a bit empty in that it's mostly just an introduction to the characters and the premise: Kaede meets Tsubasa, is scared of whether he can handle a relationship with her, but decides to persevere and start dating. The characters are sweet and interesting, though, so volume 1 did its job of making want to read the rest; Kaede is earnest and easy to root for, Tsubasa is forward in a way that is charming but makes you wonder, and Kaede's two best friends are deeply supportive and protective of him. As mentioned, the sensitive subject matter is dealt with very frankly, and characters were sometimes so open-minded and accepting about boys' mental health struggles that it strained my suspension of disbelief a bit, but the topics are handled with respect. The frankness meant that there was a surprising lack of friction in establishing the core relationship, which makes me curious how things will develop and what kinds of conflicts will happen in future volumes.