The Spring 2020 Manga Guide

Star-Crossed

What's It About? 

Asuza loves nothing in the world more than her favorite idol Chika, from the group Prince 4 U. The walls of her room are plastered with his posters, she knows every line to every song, every move of every dance, and will drop everything to see them should they come to town. Thankfully, she has managed to get tickets, and is in the audience, as close to the stage as she can get, when something terrible happens. The lights fall, and in a moment of pure impulse, she jumps to the stage as she and her favorite idol are crushed to death. Except…it appears there's been a mistake. God did not intend for this to happen. Both Chika and Asuza still have long, happy lives ahead of them, and God sends them back to Earth with apologies and assurances that it won't happen again. But when Asuza and Chika come to, they have swapped bodies. Asuza now inhabits the form of her favorite idol, and Chika is now in the body of a girl he never met until today. As God continues to sort things out and get to the bottom of the problem, it appears that Chika and Asuza are going to have to adjust to their new existence and the stress and surprise as they are constantly switched back and forth.

Star-Crossed!! is an original manga series by Junko. It is published by Kodansha Comics, retailing for $7.99 digitally.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Faye Hopper

Rating:

Star-Crossed!! is what it intends to be and little more. While its body-swapping romance does have a few funny moments and some genuine charm, its ambitions are modest—it wants to be cute, it wants to make jokes based on mistaken identity and the usual, how-do-I-navigate-another-person's-life contrivances of its premise, and it wants to develop a relationship between its two leads–and its effect on the reader is modest in turn. That said, good, well-executed entertainment is good entertainment, and this manga is nothing if not immensely readable.

I do like the interesting twist on the formula where Chika and Asuza elect to tell somebody about their body-swapping rut. Typically, in these stories, the pair don't even bother. And if they do, their attempts to impart the truth are met with laughter and skepticism. And yet here, at a certain point when it feels the book might be running out of steam, the manga makes the decision to alter its standard operation and take its story in a new direction. Star-Crossed!! has the kind of premise where, if the author is not careful, the book stands to sag due to repetition and through failing to create new comedic scenarios. This narrative choice and some genuinely inventive jokes (like when Asuza, in Chika's body, botches an unfamiliar dance routine as the real Chika looks on in horror and embarrassment) indicate that Junko, the mangaka, is attempting to keep every scene fresh and every joke novel. It's this level of care and craft that makes Star-Crossed!! a breezy, charming read even when its basis is in a simple love story and the simple humor of watching two people flail around wildly in unfamiliar circumstances.

The more I write about it, the more I'm developing affection for Star-Crossed!!. Yes, its characters are mostly one-note stereotypes (an exuberant, obsessive fangirl, a stoic, no-nonsense idol focused on his craft, etc.) and its seldom moments of pathos are as pat as they are predictable (Chika and his manager having promised to succeed, always by each other's side, is as standard an idol story beat as they come, even if it followed by a fairly cute joke), but it tries to make its Freaky Friday love story as inventive and entertaining as possible; it tries to shake up its status quo in cool, neat ways and always leave the reader guessing as to when Chika and Asuza are going to swap bodies next. Sometimes all you need to make a manga work is a little extra effort, and to keep up energy and excitement even if you're writing a story people have read before. Star-Crossed!! does have effort, and it does have energy, and in that sense, it does succeed.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Although body-swap stories aren't my favorite, I have enjoyed Junko's work before, both in Kiss Him, Not Me and her BL titles. That resulted in a volume that I found myself fairly ambivalent about – it does indulge in some of the tropes of the mixed-gender body-swap that can be annoying, but it also has enough of what makes Junko's work fun to balance it out. Part of that fun is the base premise: superfan Asuka and her boy band idol are accidentally killed, and when God brings them back to life, something goes wrong and they're put in each other's bodies, with an as-yet-undetermined trigger to switch back and forth. By making the pair in this case not siblings or friends or any of the other variations on the genre that have previously been published in English, the story gains an edge of insanity that its genre badly needs, namely that Chika's career is in jeopardy every minute that he's not in his own body. This is balanced out by the fact that it puts Asuka's super fangirling to good use: she knows the songs and the moves perfectly because she's so obsessed with the group…except the newest stuff, because there's no way that she could know them when Chika barely does. This means that Chika is in a state of nervous terror basically all the time, because the stakes are so much higher for him as a pop idol, while Asuka's biggest concern is that she'll have to touch his penis when she's in his body.

Admittedly this is one of those genre tropes that often grates, but here it's interesting if only because it's working with ideas of “purity” in Japanese fan culture – namely that there's no sexual element to Asuka's fantasies about Chika. Since the group's name is P4U (and okay, an infantile part of me snickers every time I read it), with the “P” standing for “prince,” that suggests that she's got the whole knight-on- a-white-horse idea in her head, something that perhaps wouldn't last long once she's living in his physical body and forced to face the earthier aspects of him head-on. (Chika, meanwhile, just isn't keen on her seeing/touching his body.) Throw in the fact that when Asuka-in-Chika's-body trips and falls onstage she accidentally kisses bandmate Haru and he clearly doesn't hate it, and things are looking much rockier for Chika than for her in this whole situation. That God – a semi-chibi old man who isn't entirely sure what's going on – is clueless about the whole thing and how to fix it feels like a fun bonus.

This does still hew pretty close to its genre tropes, and I was very surprised to see that both protagonists are high school students (I was under the impression that Chika was older), but it is decently fun. I'm told that volume two improves things quite a bit and I kind of like Asuka's poor enamored friend, so I'd say that even though it isn't a great debut, it's worth giving it a little longer to get going.