The Fall 2023 Manga Guide

Ogami-san Can't Keep It In

What's It About? 

Ogami-san has been keeping a dirty little secret from her peers at school: Puberty has emptied her mind of everything but perverted fantasies! For the sake of leading an ordinary school life, she pulls out all the stops to keep her mental wild side under wraps. But when she literally reaches a hand out to Yaginuma-kun, a cute but mysterious boy in her class, her innermost thoughts just come spilling out! All she wants is to get to know him (and his body) better, but she can't do that without the risk of exposing her true self. What's a girl to do?!

Ogami-san Can't Keep It In has story and art by Yu Yoshidamaru. The translation is by Max Greenway. Dietrich Premier did lettering and touch-ups. Published by Kodansha Comics (October 24, 2023).

Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

Sold as a "spicy" rom-com and featuring a fixation on sexual content, Ogami-san Can't Keep It In is not, in fact, a "fanservice" series. Instead, it's reveling in the perverse, particularly its titular lead character's fascination with all things lascivious and lustful. It is an authentic, often funny take on all the anguishes of adolescence. It's that knowingly cringe-inducing approach to the awkward teenage truths of sexuality, not necessarily as raw as something like O Maidens in Your Savage Season, but still very much in the same ballpark and entertaining in a lot of the same ways. Ogami's struggles make her relatable and endearing, which amusingly bears out in the story itself as she slowly realizes that her classmates like her fine the way she is. Don't we all love a disastrous gremlin girl as a rom-com lead?

However, this book isn't meant to be wholly carried by Ogami. The interlocking friend group she acquires throughout this first volume is about showing off how fellow weirdos who think themselves too awkward to socialize can grow by opening up by not "keeping it in," as it were. A first friend and ostensible love interest, Yaginuma is the object of incitation for much of these changes, and the mechanics of that may be the more contentious part of this story far beyond Ogami's uncouth fixations and fantasies. Yaginuma's unexplained fantastical contact-compulsion powers are a swerve at first (though admittedly one that provokes a pretty solid "Go back and read an earlier part with new context" reaction). However, creator Yu Yoshidamaru is quickly able to settle into using Yaginuma's abilities mainly as a way to nudge the characters into their necessary ventures outside their comfort zones, as well as for some honestly great little punch-lines, primarily in the form of Ogami's pervy non-sequiturs. Yaginuma's deadpan reactions make these moments even funnier.

Once you can roll with that odder inclusion, Ogami-san Can't Keep It In becomes a fun, good-natured tale tinged by its refreshingly frank approach. "Shameless" definitely wouldn't be the right word since Ogami's unhinged embarrassment is one of the whole features of the book. But it's satisfying seeing her get over that to be able to manage stuff like forging a new female friendship based on a mutual mystified fixation on armpit hair. And its turn to drama late in the first volume still feels natural, as the story can hone in on the crippling self-loathing that comes from lonesome adolescence and how that isolation can turn us into our worst enemies. The way we interpret how other people react to us is something we thus internalize, so it can feel miraculous when we have even a single person who we can tell genuinely accepts and believes in us. That upswing in its characters that it's always shooting for means that Ogami-san Can't Keep It In never feels like it's wallowing in its self-imposed misery for too long, instead coming off like a genuine ode going out to all the freaks and weirdos out there.