The Fall 2022 Manga Guide

Tsubaki-chō Lonely Planet

What's It About? 

Fumi Ohno is used to being poor. Thanks to her father's debts, she's evicted out of her house and has to scrounge up money herself to survive. She takes a up a job as a live-in housekeeper for a popular, but reclusive, novelist.

Tsubaki-chō Lonely Planet has story and art by Mika Yamamori, with English translation by Taylor Engel and lettering by Lys Blakeslee, and Yen Press will release its first volume both digitally and physically on October 4.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

Tsubaki-chō Lonely Planet has a very basic set-up, but this is a case where the execution is all you really need. Protagonist Fumi is charming and endearing with her optimism and can-do nature; she comes off like a softer Tohru Honda. Her boss, Kibikino, is the typical gruff-and-stern guy with a heart of gold who somehow starts to send Fumi's heart a-flutter. It's a cute set-up as the two grow slightly closer, with Fumi learning to appreciate Kibikino's subtleties and Kibikino slowly growing more protective of his Girl Friday. Aioi serves as a good foil, and I'm kinda hoping we get to see Kibikino deck him.

About the one thing that sticks in my craw about this manga is that Fumi and Kibikino have a bit of an age difference; Kibikino seems to be in his 20s, and Fumi is 16. It definitely takes the wind out of my sails when Kibikino says something profound that leaves Fumi all fluttery. But this is a very sweet, charming romance in spite of that. It's also got appropriately cozy art, making this a strong recommendation.

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Christopher Farris

Rating:

I find myself placing bets at the outset of Tsubaki-chō Lonely Planet, a shoujo series with an earnest, hard-working girl falling on hard times. Will her move into the live-in housekeeper business be some sort of Fruits Basket situation? As it happens, there aren't any supernatural happenings yet apparent in Tsubaki-chō; rather, the procession of hot dudes who enter into Fumi's life are just kind of run-of-the-mill jerks. It thus generates another guessing game, prompting the question of if this is simply going to be a story of Fumi and Kibikino, the author she ends up playing maid for, connecting in platonic companionship (or even a surrogate father filling the space of Fumi's dead-beat dad), or if there is going to be an actual romance developing here. By the end of this first volume, the latter is the apparent route we're taking, and I can't say I buy that direction.

Apart from the odd age-gap issue (we don't know exactly what age Kibikino is, but he's definitely not a high schooler) the main problem with Tsubaki-chō Lonely Planet is just that its conflicts feel very low-stakes for the sort of drama it's trying to sell. It's not coasting by on simple slice-of-life times – there is some tension here – but the jerkery of Kibikino and others in Fumi's life feels very low-key. Fumi and the author she's attending slip into a pretty predictable routine of him acting brusque towards her, before a situation prompts him to reveal that he actually does care about her in his own way, rinse, repeat. On the other end of things, you've got transfer student Aioi, who holds a grudge against Fumi for beating him in a marathon as a kid, and holds her book of supermarket stamps hostage to compel her to act as his lackey. It's all simple, petty jerkwaditude that feels less dialed up for steamy fantasy purposes and more the result of the author thinking some kind of conflict is the only way to instill romantic tension.

Fumi herself is an appealing heroine, with her frugalness leading to some fun characteristic jokes. But so much of the story so far seems fixated on drilling in some socialized need for companionship within her, painting her as the upstart, self-assured young girl who simply doesn't realize how fragile she actually is. There's this sense of painting the world she's trying to thrive in as a hostile environment that warrants the companionship and protection of a man, as coarse as these dudes may come off as. There's an idea in there somewhere about the romanticization of transactional relationships, which is something you can make work, but you need more hills and valleys to navigate in that sort of story, instead of generalized light friction. I don't mind melodrama, but it needs to be strong melodrama, you dig?

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

It's a good few months for Mika Yamamori – she's got two series with physical releases. That's good news for anyone who enjoyed her previous English-language release, Daytime Shooting Star, and this title, Tsubaki-chō Lonely Planet, looks like it may be in a similar vein. Heroine Fumi is being set up to be torn between two guys, the older Kibikino and her classmate Isshin. The problem? Both of them are kind of jerks, although it must be said that they're jerks in believable ways. Kibikino is a young author who thought he was getting an older housekeeper only to find himself saddled with a (highly competent) high school girl, while Isshin is nursing an old grudge that's probably actually a crush in the approved manner of shoujo romances. Either way, both guys are a lot for poor Fumi to deal with.

As with Daytime Shooting Star, it's the heroine who makes this book. Fumi's got one of the genre's most enduring tropes, a Debt Dad, and he's left her to go work on a tuna boat after they're evicted from their apartment. Fumi's used to living hand-to-mouth anyway, and she's determined to make the best of it – she's not thrilled to become a live-in cook and housekeeper for an author, but the way she sees it, at least she's not out on the street. Both she and Kibikino are shocked by each other's youth, but Fumi doesn't let anything hold her back for long, and she manages to be a go-getter without being one of those overly cheerful types. She's hurting, but she keeps pushing it down, and we get the feeling that she's been doing that for a long, long time.

For his part, Kibikino doesn't seem to realize that he's being a twit most of the time; he's just got the people skills of a radish. Once he figures out what Fumi's actual situation is, he makes a real attempt to be better, and while he's still not exactly a friendly person, his efforts make up for a lot of that. Isshin is a bit more difficult to like at this point, but since Fumi's feelings are swaying towards Kibikino, that's not a major issue just yet, although we can't forget that the love interest made an abrupt shift in the author's previously-released series. This is mostly just a setup volume, getting us ready for the drama that's almost certain to come in future books, but even if it isn't particularly new or thrilling, it is a solid start from a creator who has proven herself before.

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MrAJCosplay

Rating:

Yeah, when you have a 16-year-old girl being forced to work as a housemaid for a young grouchy artist, you're already setting off a lot of warning bells in my head. Age difference aside, there's an obvious power dynamic here that can very easily come across as exploitative if not handled well. But for what it's worth, Lonely Planet does leave a good enough foundation for a believable friendly and familial relationship to blossom between our two leads. It doesn't do quite enough by the end of this first volume for me to be convinced that a romantic relationship should blossom between these two, but at the very least, my aforementioned fears about exploitative power dynamics are more than absolved.

This is basically a story of a young girl, Fumi, coming to the realization that the world can be a lot crueler than she originally might've thought, being plucked out of her rather small yet comfortable bubble and forced to deal with new men in her life that sort of end up dictating what she does. Some of those men abuse that power and others use it as an opportunity to teach her lessons about the world. The pacing is tight and the art style, while a little simple, provides a decent amount of expressiveness to the characters that helps the emotion fly off the page. I like the fact that the author who looks after Fumi actually tries to take his role as a guardian seriously even though it's clear that he is also out of his element. But grouchiness aside, there is a passion there that Fumi feels and it's hard to not also feel it as a reader. I think our two leads have a lot that they can learn from each other and I'm curious to see how else they can grow as people in future volumes.