Ojikoi by Kakeru Tsutsumi

Ojikoi by Kakeru Tsutsumi

Art and story (c) Kakeru Tsutsumi

Genre: Shojo

Length: One Volume – 7 Chapters

            Art is a little amateur, but just in a sketchy way, the proportions are okay everywhere except for the face once or twice. There are some backgrounds and tones, but its just as equally blank. The action is done well. The faces are easy to read, and the eyes have good expressiveness but they, too, have some of that unfinished look to them. Clothes are fairly plain, and lack detail. Its familiar but only because I've read about a million manga with the same vague appeal. The generic quality of the art didn't win this manga any points but it didn't detract from it.

             Arashi has found part-time work that pays well and she gets to put her aikido (a Japanese martial art more info here) skills to work. The only problem is her chain smoking, sexual harassing boss. It seems like she's doing all the work while he leaves the office and fools around. Still, strangely, she can't find an excuse to leave; only excuses to stay.

               This manga is very silly right off the bat, though it is pretty short at only 150 pages, I'd guess a hard copy would have some sort of special or one-shot at the end to fill it out to the normal page length of a volume, as it is its quite wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am. It is very similar in plot to a manga I have reviewed before (Houkago x Ponytail) still, it is distinctly different in someways so I liked it better. For example, the age gap is very obvious in this one, which makes it less ambiguous even though the ages are also not expressly written, the art shows the ages much better. I don't mind a large age gap, but I suppose if you find such things gross, you won't like this as the male lead is obviously something in the low to mid 30s. Some how, even though the ages aren't given, its less creepy than the last one of this genre, I think the behavior of the couple helps. The boss is so silly too, so its obvious why Arashi (or as he calls her Ran-chan) sticks around to see what kind of weird stuff he gets into. Plus Arashi's irrational violence is a good pairing. The love story aspect doesn't feel as sudden as Houkago x Ponytail, either, since the two seem to have been working together for a while before you come in on the story but it does take an abrupt turn when things need to be ended. I think one more chapter or some kind of extras would have endeared me to it more. I enjoyed it a lot, put it also suffers from the one volume syndrome of either being too short or too long, in this case too short, so its so hard to give full marks to Ojikoi despite the fun it was reading it.

4/5 Worth the read for the chuckles and cheesy romance.