The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

With the Sheikh in His Harem

What's It About? 

Sanagi loves nothing more than money—not even love. After all, it's what keeps her small family going. But when a chance encounter with a stranger leads her to push away his offer of riches, she wonders if she's gone crazy...and starts to believe she really has when he reveals that he's a Sheikh, and proposes to her! She rejects him, but soon finds out that a marriage with him might be the only way to keep her family safe...!

With the Sheikh in His Harem is drawn and scripted by Rin Miasa and Kodansha Comics released its first volume in digital on May 4

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

With the Sheikh in His Harem's relationship to the real Middle East is roughly equivalent to Fancy Feast's relationship to human food – there are recognizable bits, but you wouldn't want to eat it for dinner. That said, it's well within its rights as the progeny of Edith Maude Hull's 1919 romance novel The Sheikh, which jump-started the whole so-called "desert romance" subgenre, along with some of the less savory elements of the romance genre. (It's a landmark novel in so many bad ways.) So just remember: as problematic as you may find this, Hull's book is roughly 900 times worse.

And actually, both within the romance and shoujo groups, this isn't all that bad. Probably its biggest failing (apart from setting issues) is the use of the insta-love trope, wherein Lui, the eponymous sheikh, falls madly in love with heroine Sanagi minutes after she spurns his money and convinces him not to jump off a roof. (It turns out that that is what he was trying to do, and the late-volume return to that point is a good moment in terms of understanding Lui.) He then proposes to her, saves her family from drowning in debt, and whisks her away to his fictional country, where his (step?)mother decides that Sanagi must die for Plot Reasons.

That those reasons clearly have to do with Lui being both more likeable than her son, the crown prince, and him bearing a strong resemblance to the kingdom's founder doesn't necessarily make her move on Sanagi all that much better or sensical. But since this is pure escapism, that matters less than you might think. In a story where a seventeen-year-old foreign prince can marry a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a Christian ceremony (a religion he clearly does not practice) and whisk her away to his nation after buying her high school and bailing her father out of debt, “evil mother-in-law” barely even scratches the surface. Honestly, I was more bothered by Sanagi walking around the local market in her school uniform with her arms, legs, and head uncovered than anything that happened to drive the story.

This may not be the most intelligent story to be covered in this Guide, but it's still honestly kind of fun, and it definitely falls under the heading of "old-fashioned shoujo fluff." The art is pretty enough (and some of the details are really nice) and Sanagi isn't a doormat, which also helps. It may strain your credulity, but it's aware of the fact – the creator mentions reading some of the Harlequin takes on the genre – and that somehow cures a lot of ills, real or imagined, that this volume may have.