Momoko Kōda seems to specialize in stories that are just this side a feeling universal. Her previous work to see English translation, No Longer Heroine, also features a heroine who is caught up in how she thinks things are supposed to be. Saho, the heroine of this piece, has the opposite problem of the protagonist of the former story: she was once hurt by a beautiful boy whom she had a crush on and has since decided that all gorgeous men are untrustworthy. She regularly curses them to become fat and bald. Naturally, this means she has a run-in with the hottest J-pop idol out there when he comes to her family diner looking for a home-cooked meal. Her horror at realizing who he is is compounded when he assumes she's his fan. Not that that's a difficult assumption for him to make; given his celebrity status, it's hard to imagine that he encounters all that many girls looking to get his autograph for their friend rather than for themselves. But when he turns on the idol charm, Saho is furious and immediately begins to tell him off. At first, she feels very self-righteous about this, but when she looks back over her shoulder, she realizes that he's in tears, providing her the first of many hints that maybe even beautiful men are human too.

This is both the strongest and weakest element of this book. It seems like it never occurred to Saho that boys are just as human as she is. While Kouta's initial reaction when he assumes that she is his fan does feel very boundary-crossing (he wraps his arm around her shoulders and kisses her on the top of her head, which is both not okay and understandable in the context of celebrity culture), Saho's early interactions with him come off as being a little bit mean, and not just because he has paper-thin skin. That he does have that incredible sensitivity to the thought that he's done something to make himself unlikable to someone indicates that there's a lot more going on here than most of the other characters assume. Kouta has an almost pathological need to be liked, and when we pair that with both a statement he makes to Saho and the glimpse we see of a picture of him in middle school with a girl next to a bouquet on his desk, we can begin to assume that, like Saho, he has something in his past that is influencing his present in ways he perhaps cannot fully understand it. For Kouta, it may be easier to be the idol of thousands than to be the boyfriend of one, and while that isn't unheard of within the genre, it does open the door for the story to begin to feel a little bit more even than this first volume would suggest.

Part of the issue with this volume is that Saho's abrupt shift into liking Kouta feels, well, abrupt. He is a nice guy, but her change of heart is too fast, and that evolution owes at least a little bit to him being condescending to her. For all that Saho is gung-ho about her distrust and dislike of attractive men, his charm offensive works just a little bit too quickly and undermines her character to a degree. Granted, she is a sixteen-year-old girl, and her life experience and perhaps understanding of her own emotions are both limited. But for a girl who has been keeping a notebook of what she calls her ironclad precepts to suddenly make a left turn about them feels like the author didn't quite know how to handle her change of heart, or at the very least wanted to get it out of the way sooner rather than later. Kouta's charming condescension is almost certainly not something he is fully aware of himself; as snide little authorial asides note, most of his idol habits are very much the product of having been a member of a major idol group for so long. This suggests that the story's throughline could be much more focused on both characters overcoming their learned behaviors to be more faithful to themselves and find long-lasting happiness; this is a romantic comedy that needs to be done with a light touch. But like in Koda's previous title, there's something that feels a tiny bit off about the whole setup, as if some transition phase is being left out, bringing things down with it.

I'll give My Special One a second volume because it isn't without potential. Koda's familiar enough with the standards of comedic romance to use them with a light touch. Yes, it could work more smoothly. But if you didn't like No Longer Heroine, you ought to think long and hard about whether or not you want to pick up another book by the same creator because while this is a good enough book, it also just feels a little off in ways that are difficult to pin down, an issue that was also present in No Longer Heroine.