Koharu and Minato: Happy Life With My Girlfriend Volume 1 Manga Review

Synopsis

Artists Daruma and Hyaluron (a.k.a Koharu and Minato) tell the tale of their romance in this autobiographical slice-of-life yuri manga. Koharu and Minato met online in the VTuber fandom and fell in love after years of doing collaboration streams and voice chatting every night. Now the long-distance girlfriends have moved in together and are learning to navigate domestic life as a couple!

A Cozy Autobiography

Cards on the table, Koharu and Minato: Happy Life With My Girlfriend is not one of the more informative or introspective queer autobiographical manga out there. But that’s by design: by the artists’ own admission, this manga is a space to “gush about” each other and celebrate an idealized, adorable rendition of their love story and relationship. It’s pure fluff with a personal focus and does not have anything much to say except “See how much we love each other and how cute we are?” I think that makes it a lovely addition to the ever-expanding spectrum of LGBTQIA+ essay manga. But if you’re hoping for more profound or detailed insights into Japan’s contemporary queer scene, or personal musings about queer identity in a specific cultural context, you might find yourself disappointed. 

This is a fundamentally low-stress read that pairs best with a lazy Saturday morning and your choice of hot beverage. The official synopsis claims that “relationships aren’t always easy, but Minato and Koharu find a way to work things out” and I am… struggling to find a place where that applies to this volume. There’s precious little in the way of conflict, and the “plot,” as it were, is so frictionless that reading this feels like sliding across a sheet of silk. There’s some angst in flashbacks as the couple first become friends, realize their feelings for each other, and try to work out the practicalities of a long-distance relationship, but the reader knows they’re going to end up together in domestic bliss, so it’s hardly cause for tension. 

Some examples of the “conflicts” in the narrative include them being too comfy cuddling on the couch together to get up and get work done and Minato not being able to get rid of any old clothes because Koharu says she looks too pretty in all of them! It’s just a kick-your-feet cute-fest from start to finish. Whether this gives you wistful hope that queer happiness can and does exist or gives you a sugar rush from how ridiculously sweet it is all the time will depend on your mood and your tastes. It’s 100% intended as a comfort read, and on that front, I think it delivers. 

Yuri-fy Your Life

As a meta exercise, it’s interesting to see the creative choices the artists have made to effectively fit their life story into an existing subgenre. The art style, tone, and overall vibe mean that Koharu and Minato slots perfectly on the shelf next to fictional slice-of-life yuri like The Two of Them Are Pretty Much Like This and Monthly in the Garden with My Landlord. The storytelling also invokes a lot of manga tropes and stock jokes, like Koharu getting a nosebleed when overwhelmed by her attraction to Minato. This isn’t a unique trait—The Girl Who Can’t Get a Girlfriend, for example, draws on an existing visual language and pop culture references to convey its autobiographical story—but I find the extent of the artists’ cutesy yuri-fication of their own lives interesting. 

If I’m being cynical, I could say that putting queer experience through a marketable, adorable filter muddles the manga’s status as nonfiction. But I think it’s important to keep the motivation behind the work in mind: this is a platform for two goofy, loved-up girlfriends to romanticize each other and their own experiences in their creative medium of choice. They’re open about this comic being a love letter to one another, so you have to take their depictions with a grain of salt and understand that we’re looking at a very idealized, dramatized thing that can’t really be read as total fact. 

With all that in mind, there are some editorial choices I have to question. I can’t really critique the creative choice to have the couple meet and start hanging out online while Koharu is 27 and Minato is still a 17-year-old high school student, because that’s not a creative choice, that’s just how it happened in real life. I can, however, raise my eyebrows at the choice to have Koharu (at least, the manga version of her) wax poetic about how Minato seems mature for her age and, ironically and simultaneously, think of her future girlfriend as “a little sister.” The optics of that are… a bit odd. I’m going to assume, in good faith, that playing into uncomfortable tropes around age-gap relationships was an unfortunate storytelling accident. When you’re depicting your love story with established tropes, perhaps it’s inevitable that you run into potentially problematic ones sooner or later?

Verdict

Koharu and Minato: Happy Life with My Girlfriend is a cute and breezy read in which a real couple paint themselves into the slice-of-life genre. Readers hungry for a more informative or introspective queer autobiography might be disappointed. But aside from some uncomfortable phrasing choices in the presentation of their age-gap romance, it was fun to spend a lazy weekend morning with these girlfriends.

Credits

Story and art: Daruma and Hyaluron
Translation: Megan Turner
Adaptation: Asha Bardon
Lettering: Mercedes McGarry
Cover Design: H. Qi
Proofreader: Kendall Jennings
Production Design: Melina
Senior Editor: Shannon Fay

Published in English by Seven Seas

Thank you to Seven Seas for providing an advanced review copy of this manga. Receiving an advanced copy had no impact on the reviewer’s opinions.

Article edited by: Anne Estrada