The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

April Showers Bring May Flowers

What's It About? 

Pessimistic high school student Hana Tabata doesn't believe her life could ever be like that of a heroine from the shoujo manga she reads—she's convinced she's ugly, and she's always alone. Still, she can't help but imagine herself as a leading lady when she's changing out flowers early one morning...until she's caught in the act by her handsome classmate Yousuke Ueno! Hana can't wrap her head around his kind words at first, but as they grow closer, she finds her life slowly beginning to change…

April Showers Bring May Flowers has a story and art by Roku Sakura, with English translation by Leighann Harvey. This volume was lettered by Bianca Pistillo. Published by Yen Press (November 26, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

The idea that April Showers Bring May Flowers implies that there is always something good to look forward to in the wake of something bad happening. However, for our protagonist Hana, there is nothing but showers. The trope of the cynical, ugly girl falling into more typical Shōjo situations is not new but I always like it when a story really commits to its bit and this definitely falls into the category. What do you do when you have a character that basically comes off like a human version of Sadness from the movie Inside Out? In this story, Hana gets all of the flags that she thinks she would never get out of life. This is a girl who has inadvertently gained the attention of one of the most popular boys in school and inadvertently made a rival with the prettiest girl in her class. She can't get close to either of them without thinking something terrible is going to happen to her because that's just how bad our protagonist's self-esteem is.

While I think the bit gets old by the end of the first volume, the comedy is very strong right out of the gate. It never feels like the story is punching down with Hana because it's also careful to highlight the qualities about her that people might find endearing. She's hard-working and is someone who does appreciate the beauty in a lot of things, the problem is she just doesn't see herself as one of those beautiful things. However, this isn't a story about beautiful people getting exactly what they want, it's a story about everybody else realizing that maybe there is more to life than the tropes that define the genre they're in. I like the fact that the story starts with very strong comedy but then slowly transitions into a bit of a slow-burn romantic buildup. I'm sitting on the edge of my seat waiting until something hits Hana in the face so hard that she has no choice but to confront it head on and maybe that is something that's being set up for volume two. Regardless, I think this is a solid read that could probably get you through the afternoon, but I'm very curious to see how later volumes potentially expand upon that.

I was leery going into this one – stories about so-called ugly girls can take very nasty turns or become trite sugary messes very easily. Fortunately, April Showers Brings May Flowers manages to avoid both of those outcomes by remaining firmly in the heads of its characters, almost to the exclusion of anyone else's thoughts. We spend most of the book with Tabata, but we also get chapters from Uguisudani's perspective and Shinbashi's. All three characters are very different, and all of them help to illustrate the idea that no one is exactly what they appear to be and that we can never really know what someone else is thinking.

Tabata's the person who most desperately needs to learn this lesson. She's not shoujo manga pretty, but she's hardly the “fat uggo” she calls herself, and most of her worries seem to come from overconsumption of shoujo romances and casual middle school cruelty. Tabata's opinion of herself is so far underground that you'd need dynamite to find it, and every interaction she has with someone else is immediately interpreted in the worst way possible…except, of course, with the one person she ought to be wary of, pretty girl Uguisudani. Uguisudani's deal is that she's fully aware of her pretty privilege and isn't shy about using it; she's been playing the role of Nice Pretty Girl since elementary school. Now in high school, she thinks she ought to reap the rewards, in the form of Ueno-kun, the oblivious class heartthrob…who she thinks is dating, or at least has a crush on, Tabata. Meanwhile, Shinbashi is so determined to leave his lonely middle school days as a social outcast behind that he's busy following magazine guidelines to the point where he's a caricature of himself, swanning around with a crush on Uguisudani and saying “eyyyy” like a modern-day Fonz.

All of this is so very real to high school that it's a toss-up between laughing and burying your face in a pillow in secondhand embarrassment. Little details like Tabata's mother, the patron saint of embarrassing parents, being way too eager to interpret things in her daughter's favor, help to ground this in something that, if not quite reality, will still be awfully familiar. The art does its part, too, with something always looking just a little off about the way Uguisudani stares at Tabata or how Tabata looks a little different depending on who's looking at her. And all of this almost hides one very important point: the one head we don't get into is Ueno's. He's the unattainable object to everyone around him, but the little glimpses we see of his inner life show that in his mind, and in reality, he's just a normal boy. That message of normalcy could be the heart of this series. I'm interested to read more and find out.