manga review: Love Roma

November 7, 2008 by J!-ENT

In a recent review for the Daily Yomiuri, Christoph Mark reviews “Love Roma”:

Being too honest, or merely saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, can destroy a relationship that might otherwise be written in the stars. Anyone who has ever been in love with somebody has surely done so, and no doubt regrets it.

That is, unless you are a high school boy named Hoshino-kun or the love of his life, Negishi-san, the two protagonists of Love Roma, a story about blossoming love between two teenagers, one of whom always manages to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Yet somehow, the two stay together.

Hoshino-kun starts out as a very formal, very polite freshman who seems to be missing that switch most people have in their brains that tells them what not to say and when not to say it. In fact, Love Roma begins with such an instance, as Hoshino-kun confesses his love to Negishi-san, a girl who doesn’t even know his name, in front of her entire class. Embarrassing enough in private, it is downright terrifying for her when it’s done in front of her pubescent peers.

The two begin to date, with the stiff Hoshino-kun spouting off plenty of romantic prose, only to inappropriately cap it off by announcing to her classmates that he wants to touch “her boob,” or openly telling a reporter for the school newspaper that he wants to sleep with Negishi-san and that he has secret desires about her.

Time continues to go by, and their relationship continues to grow despite these constantly embarrassing interjections by him, and her usual response to them, which includes a slap or a punch to the face.

The five-volume series is surprisingly funny, often laugh-out-loud–though half the time is laughing with the comic; the other half laughing at it. The intended humor is funny on its own, but the stiff, almost comical translation left me wondering whether the low quality was intentional. In addition to bizarrely literal uses of perfectly translatable Japanese expressions (”sweet candy and whip” for “carrot and stick”), the use of the third person in reference to the person spoken to, though acceptable in Japanese, is annoying and possibly a form of mocking in English.