I Can’t Refuse S Volume 1 Manga Review (Minor Spoilers)

At a Glance:

Spice Level: 1/5
Mosaics: N/A
Recommend: No
Content Warnings: dubious consent/sexual assault involving a power imbalance

Cute and shy Miku Hirose has a problem. Her father is 50 million yen in the hole and has saddled Miku and her mother with the debt. Unable to get out of it through divorce and unwilling to claim bankruptcy, Miku and her mother are having a hard time staying afloat. To make it worse, Miku’s mother falls seriously ill due to the stress and is unable to help with raising the necessary funds. And though she’s worked all sorts of jobs, Miku can’t take care of them both with the way things are.

So she decides to sell her body.

Being distantly related to a successful businessman, Hakuouin, who has helped her family before, Miku turns to him in the hopes of becoming his mistress. When she arrives at Hakuouin’s mansion, it isn’t he that invites her in, but his butler, Kamishiro. Miku is forced to explain her awkward story and subsequent request to the handsome butler, which he relays to his master on her behalf. However, when Kamishiro returns, he doesn’t have the response Miku was hoping for.

Hakuouin isn’t opposed to the deal, but he’s only interested in women who know their way around a bedroom, and being a virgin, Miku is anything but a confident lady of the evening. Not all hope is lost, though. Hakuouin asks his butler to test Miku to see if there’s any potential in her, and if there is, Kamishiro is to train her to become a topnotch mistress. If Miku can prove to Kamishiro that she’s worth teaching, she’ll have the best chance to relieve her family of their debt. But that’s if she can master Kamishiro’s lessons.

The Good

I Can’t Refuse S has a very good translation and the art is nice and clean.

The Bad

Miku is not the sort of main character that I care about, especially not in an 18+ josei where one of the big plot points involves sex. She is too naive, too awkward, and too much of a ‘pure virgin’ trope to fit well in this genre, let alone this type of plot. How she’s written makes the entire volume horribly cringy to read. I flew through the sexual scenes because I couldn’t stand to look at the panels too long.

In every scene, Miku is drawn with a massive blush on her face because then the idea of even talking about sex seems to be too extreme for her to handle. Even when she’s ‘being taught’, she basically just stands there and allows Kamishiro to do whatever it is he wants as if she’s a doll. Add on the fact that the power dynamic between Miku and Kamishiro is tipped all the way on Kamishiro’s side makes these scenes even worse.

The story reads less like a young woman learning how to command her sexuality and more like a story about an oblivious child being groomed and raped because she’s been lead to believe it’s the only way to save her sick mother. The Condemned Villainess Goes Back in Time and Aims to Become the Ultimate Villain isn’t an 18+ manga, yet does a better job of having the virgin main character take control of her sexuality, and that character is thrown into a brothel against her will.

On top of Miku’s character being poorly written, Kamishiro’s personality is flat, the story is boring, the plot twists are easy to see, and nothing happens. Half of this manga is dedicated to sexual scenes (~91 pages out of ~184 pages) and they are too awkward to read. Besides the quick rundown on how Miku can become a mistress to establish the plot, nothing else happens.

The Spice (Minor Spoilers)

There are two main sex scenes in this volume, neither of which has Miku as an active participant, or even a truly willing one. In the first scene, Kamishiro suddenly kisses Miku and only informs her after she tells him to stop and pushes him away that Hakuouin instructed him to test her sexual abilities. Learning that this is the only chance for her to become Hakuouin’s mistress, she allows Kamishiro to do what he wants to her and follows his orders, albeit with extreme reluctance.

After Kamishiro does some light touching and foreplay on her, Miku passes out from the stress. In the other scene, Miku is yet again struggling to agree to what Kamishiro tells her to do. There’s some heavier touching done to her and some discussion on what Miku is and isn’t able/willing to do. As nothing happens below the waist before the volume ends, it’s not known whether or not the manga will use mosaics.

The Verdict

The plot of this manga interested me; nothing else did. The characters were boring, the plot fell flat, and the sexual content was awkward and cringy to read. In my opinion, Miku’s character would fit better in a bishoujo or harem manga due to the way she’s written instead of a josei. While there’s a chance for this series to get better as it goes, I doubt I’ll find out anytime soon.

If you liked I Can’t Refuse S, you might like…

• Outbride: Beauty and the Beasts
• Before You Discard Me, I Shall Have My Way With You
• Revenge Mrs. Wrong

Credits

Story and Art by Ai Hibiki
Translation by Katrina Leonoudakis
Lettering by Mercedes McGarry
Original Cover Design by norico mashico (mameco)
Cover and Logo Design by H. Qi
Proofreader Dave Murray
Copy Editor B. Lillian Martin
Editor Kristiina Korpus
Prepress Technician Melanie Ujimori and Jules Valera
Production Designer George Panella
Production Manager John Ramirez
Managing Editor J. P. Sullivan
Editor-In-Chief Julie Davis
Associate Publisher Adam Arnold
Publisher Jason DeAngelis
Published in English by Seven Seas Entertainment