The Fall 2023 Manga Guide

Virgin Love

What's It About? 

Successful, well-liked, and beautiful, twenty-six-year-old working woman Shoko Shoji seems to have it all. But behind her picture-perfect exterior is a secret that haunts her: to her chagrin, Shoko is still a virgin. Tired of making excuses for her total lack of dating experience, she signs up to live in the Love House, an experimental program seeking to test if six young singles can find romance under one shared roof. But will this change of pace be enough to help Shoko ditch her v-card for good, or will the trauma of her first broken heart jinx her forever to a life without love?

Virgin Love has a story and art by Tina Yamashina. The English translation is by JM Iitomi Crandell. Published by Vertical Comics (November 7, 2023).

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

My biggest issue with this book is one I believe is intentional by creator Tina Yamashina: heroine Shoko's virgin complex. At twenty-six, Shoko feels outside of adulthood because she's never dated or had sex, and every little dumb aggression – which is how social assumptions feel to her – makes her feel worse and worse about herself. For someone on my branch of the LGBTQIA+ tree, that's both relatable and intensely annoying because I feel like society in general (American, Japanese, whatever) puts far too much emphasis on sexual experience as a marker of “real” adulthood. If that's not your thing, it can make you feel like an outsider, or at least as if there's something “wrong” with you. And that's not even getting into the angle of ace-erasure, which doesn't seem relevant to this story.

But as I said, I think that's the point here. Shoko is, by all measures, a very successful human being. She's kind, hardworking, and popular, and the person with the biggest issue about her virginity is Shoko herself. She's internalized a lot of social garbage that's making her feel inadequate, and at least part of the idea behind her move into the Love House (a social experiment/reality show) is to help her realize that she's putting too much emphasis on this one thing. Case in point: by the end of this volume, she's got at least two of the three guys in the House very interested in her, Tanaka and Kei. To readers, Tanaka looks like her perfect match, a man who was interested in her before and sees her as her whole self. Kei is attracted to her physically before getting to know her a bit better, so in both cases, her virginity has zero to do with anything except her own mind. And if she will be with either of them (or both, though I don't see it going in that direction), Shoko needs to realize that she is enough as-is.

Virgin Love doesn't always seem comfortable with its own plot, and much of this volume feels a little like it's flailing around trying to find its story. It's both familiar and trying desperately not to be, and that's an uneasy place for a narrative. I'm not interested enough to want to see where this goes, but it does have a decent amount of potential, and if you liked Living Room Matsunaga-san or LDK, this is worth at least checking out.

MrAJCosplay

Rating:

As a society, we place an almost uncomfortable amount of value on the sexual exploits of others. Sometimes, it feels like everybody is made to feel guilty for not being pure enough or being made to feel guilty for being too pure and not having enough experience. These are, overall, very annoying sentiments that a lot of people still share. Hence, it's not surprising that we still get stories like Virgin Love, which focuses on a young woman's insecurities about not having much physical experience. She's so desperate to rectify this that she agrees to be part of a very lazily written reality show where she drags a good-natured random person into the mix for…reasons.

Yeah, this isn't the tightest and most well-written romance I've ever read. If anything, there are a lot of moments where it doesn't feel like it has a lot of focus, and that's before we get to the main narrative crux of the story. The characters seem fun, and I like the distinct designs between them, even if the writer is trying very hard to lean into specific stereotypes. However, there are moments when it feels like a lot more implied history is going on in the background that's obviously set up for later. I love romances, and I know that there's always a sense of suspension of disbelief that needs to go into the situations that invoke the story's emotions. However, usually, those emotions end up making up for any narrative pratfalls to get us to that point.

I didn't feel that reading this book. I wasn't buying any of the romantic tension between a lot of the characters because I didn't care. The premise wasn't interesting enough to have me invested in the individual characters. Maybe the intention was for the book to read like a reality show where you only see parts of what actually happens, but if that's the case, I think I would've liked a little more drama and a little less padding. Not terrible, but far from my favorite story in this guide.