Everyone's Getting Married: Volume 1 manga review

Manga
Everyone's Getting Married: Volume 1 manga review
By Leroy Douresseaux
June 23, 2016 - 16:34

Viz Media
Writer(s): Izumi Miyazono, Katherine Schilling
Penciller(s): Izumi Miyazono
Letterer(s): Inori Fukuda Trant
ISBN: 978-1-4215-8715-8
$9.99 U.S., $12.99 CAN, £6.99 UK, 192pp, B&W, paperback
Rating: M (Mature)

Everyone's Getting Married Volume 1 cover image

Rated “M” for “Mature”

Everyone's Getting Married, Vol. 1 (Chapters 1 to 5) introduces 24-year-old Asuka Takanashi. She is a successful career woman with an old-fashioned dream. Asuka wants to get married and become a housewife. She thinks that she is getting close to that dream, as she has been dating her boyfriend, 30-year-old Kouichi, for five years. However, Kouichi abruptly breaks up with Asuka to pursue his own career goals.

At a get-together with some friends, Asuka encounters 28-year-old Ryu Nanami, a popular newscaster for the PTV network. She finds herself attracted to the rumored womanizer, but Ryu says that he'd rather die than get married.

[This volume includes the bonus story, “The Melancholy of Nanaryu.”]

THE LOWDOWN: The Everyone's Getting Married manga is one of those manga that pits a man and woman at odds and/or with different personalities against one another. In real life, such romances are destined to failure, sooner or later, even if they become a couple and get married (Cynical!).

Everyone's Getting Married Volume 1 offers a star-crossed pair that are destined to come together. The narrative simply offers creator Izumi Miyazono a chance to show how skilled she is at bringing them together while maximizing the tension in order to keep the readers interested. I am certainly interested in following the long and narrow rocky road to Asuka and Ryo's eventually union.

The clean storytelling matches the clean illustrations and the result is breezy graphical storytelling. In some places, clean and crystal clear means dull, but overall, the Azuka and Ryo's situation is just too tantalizing to ignore. I must qualify this review by saying that I am a sucker for shojo manga, especially when the shojo is sho'nuff on the josei side.

POSSIBLE AUDIENCE: Fans of shojo manga for older teen and adult readers will want the Shojo Beat title, Everyone's Getting Married.

A-

Rating: A-/10