Hana Tabata is a lonely, awkward 15 year old girl. She’s average-looking, prone to worrying, and has a tragically low opinion of herself. She’s a big fan of shojo manga, often negatively comparing her looks, personality, and situation in life to that of the heroine in her favorite series. She has bullied herself into believing that she’s ugly and destined for a life of isolation. She’s neither, but that doesn’t mean she stands out when two of the most popular people in her school, Ueno and Uguisudani, are in her class. In any other comic, they would be the main couple, and Hana would be a background character.
One day though, Hana’s deepest darkest secret – that she comes to school early to take care of the flowers in her homeroom, and has the audacity to put one of those flowers in her hair – is revealed to the handsome Ueno. She assumes this encounter will spell her social doom, damning her to the hell of high school dweebdom. But instead, like a flower beginning to bloom, her life starts to open up just a little bit.
The Broad Appeal
April Showers Bring May Flowers is a seinen manga, but like several seinen romcoms made available in English over the last few years, it wouldn’t feel too out of place in a shojo publication. Author Roku Sakura plays with this in a sort-of-meta way. Hana constantly references shojo manga, and the art occasionally borrows some visual tropes from it.
The plot, in its most basic form, is similar to innumerable romantic comedy stories: an unpopular girl attracts the attention of a popular boy. We assume they’ll fall for each other, because that’s the way these things go. But that doesn’t come anywhere close to happening in this volume. Hana herself seems mostly oblivious to any signs that it even could happen.
The Writing
April Showers generally seems to be moving much slower on the romance front than many similar stories. It’s a little less emotionally high-octane compared to a stereotypical shojo romance. The stakes are very low, in the way that an adult might look back on their high school cringe era and recognize that none of that was that big a deal. There’s no villain to speak of, and all of the conflict happens in Hana’s head. So, despite all the potential crossover appeal from the setup, people that seek shojo manga for its melodrama might be left wanting.
If you don’t need that type of desperate adolescent infatuation in your romcom manga, there’s plenty on offer here for genre fans. Hana is a complex, endearing, yet frustrating character. She’s constantly down on herself, reflexively avoids talking to all but one or two of her classmates, and assumes the worst of everyone. Despite this she’s also nice to a fault, as well as diligent and responsible.
Her negativity is painful to read at times, but the way she blows every little interaction out of proportion is always funny. She reminds me a little bit of myself when I was a kid. The jokes strike a really fun balance between cringe humor and the nostalgic, more cute than actually funny bits of the iyashikei genre.
The Visuals
The art strikes an interesting balance in a different way. In general it’s solid but not particularly distinctive. One thing it does extremely well is balancing the cuteness of the character art with how good-looking they’re supposed to be in the story. Hana believes herself to be mind-meltingly ugly, when in truth she’s just a normal-looking kid. She’s usually not drawn as a typical cute anime girl though. She’s a little bit chubby, has super thick dorky glasses, and hides her face a lot. Sometimes, however, like when she’s doing something she enjoys, or talking to the main boy, she’s drawn in a much more expressive way, with the wide eyes and rosy cheeks that come with normal anime cuteness.
Obviously this trick has been used in these types of stories before, but it’s well done here, and adds to the message of the story. From the other end, Ueno and Uguisudani are depicted by the plot as being highly attractive, but by anime and manga character design standards, they’re pretty normal looking too. By making Hana cute but not “anime” cute, and the love interest believable as a hottie without being outlandish, it helps push the story’s message that how you act, not how you look, is what’s important.
On the production quality front, the only issue is one tiny typo, an extra space in the middle of a word. Otherwise the translation and lettering (courtesy of Leighann Harvey and Bianca Pistillo, respectively) make for a pretty much seamless and very natural read. Some readers might take issue with the use of certain slang terms like “delulu”, since slang can quickly get dated. Personally I think it’s not worth getting worked up over. Manga gets translated at a fixed point in time but language is constantly evolving. Any word could eventually fall out of use, it just happens fast with slang and sometimes that’s a risk translators have to take to get the message across.
The Final Word
All in all, I think April Showers Bring May Flowers is off to a heartwarming start that should appeal to the whole spectrum of romantic comedy fans. It’s suitable for fans of just about any age too (there’s a little bit of PG-13 language on a single page), so please recommend it to every fan of romance manga that you know.
You can pre-order April Showers Bring May Flowers via Bookshop, Barnes and Noble and Amazon.
Credits
Author and Artist: Roku Sakura
Translation: Leighann Harvey
Lettering: Bianca Pistillo
Editing: Sharon Xu, Carl Li
Design: Wendy Chan
A special thanks to Yen Press for providing us with an advance review copy. Receiving early access to this manga has in no way altered the opinions expressed in this article.
The Good
- Cute, funny, and heartwarming with a positive but not overt message
- Wide-range of potential appeal across age and gender demographics
The Bad
- The translator's use of certain slang terms may be distracting to some readers
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