The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Diary of a Female Lead: Shujinkou Nikki

What's It About? 

Tsujimura Aoi wouldn't consider herself a main character by any means. Meek and insecure, she's constantly alone, unlike her athletic older brother, Itsuki, or her mother, a famous shojo mangaka. Aoi doesn't need to be the heroine, though--all she wants is a true friend. But Itsuki disagrees, and when he brings home Aoi's effortlessly cool classmate Mizusawa Sena, the two concoct a plan to teach Aoi all about love, using shojo manga as their guide. Can this drab side character become an unparalleled female lead by falling for the perfect guy?

Diary of a Female Lead: Shujinkou Nikki has a story and art by Yuu Yoshinaga, with English translation by Erin Husson. This volume was lettered by Carolina Hernández Mendoza. Published by Seven Seas (October 22, 2024.)

Is It Worth Reading?

I fully admit that this book rubbed me the wrong way. That's not the volume's fault – its premise is solid and has a nice metafictional angle to it, being a shoujo manga about a girl whose mother creates shoujo manga and her brother's efforts to turn her into a shoujo manga heroine. It's a bit like The Wallflower, with two hot guys working to turn a plain (or “plain”) girl into a heartthrob. But the entire idea of Aoi needing to fall in love and get a boyfriend as some sort of necessary element of her life is one that I'm not comfortable with, especially since at one point she says that she'd rather find friends than a boyfriend. Aoi's uncomfortable with her school life, but her reasons aren't what her brother and mother assume.

Aoi's got basically zero self-esteem, coming from a family where she feels like she's the least remarkable person. Her mom's famous, her brother's school-famous, and she just kind of…is, at least in her mind. She's anxious to the point where she doesn't even want to be looked at, and her worst nightmare is when her brother's hot friend Sena ends up assigned the seat next to her. But a piece of her wants to be more “normal,” which is why she allows herself to get swept up in her brother's plans. He's acting out of love for his little sister; Itsuki has all the enthusiasm of a golden retriever and thinks that he's doing what's best for her. Does he not think things through? Absolutely, but his heart's in the right place. He wants Aoi to be happy.

The problem is that other people's ideas of what will make her happy don't necessarily align with her own. It's corner Yuu Yoshinaga seems determined to paint herself into; Aoi's “I'd rather have friends” is dealt with summarily so that the story can move onto her developing a crush. That's part and parcel of what Yoshinaga is trying to do with the plot, and again, this is very likely a me thing. But Aoi undergoes so much change in so short a span of chapters that it feels jarring like Yoshinaga is forcing the character to move at her pace rather than their own. Is that potentially part of the mild lampooning of shoujo tropes? Absolutely; we all know how the genre classics work. But this is almost too mild a parody or a metafiction if that's what Yoshinaga is going for. It needs to go all-out or do something different.

I like the art, and the way that little bits of tropes and clichés are seeded throughout the volume is a lot of fun. Aoi is a solid heroine, and Itsuki's the right kind of chaotic, while Sena remains a mildly inscrutable male lead. But something about this just isn't clicking, and that's a real shame.

What's this? Another self-aware shoujo romance about a girl who doesn't think she deserves love because she thinks she's the side character of her own story yet ends up falling in love with the most conventionally attractive person in a ten-mile radius? Where have I heard this before? I find it very funny that a lot of meta-romances have been done too often to the point where they ironically end up feeling like the very thing they are trying to poke fun at. Even the style of this manga made me think that I was reading something from the nineties and I had to double-check when it officially came out in Japan. There is nothing wrong with this setup that I've outlined, but I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't at least a little bit boring.

The pacing in this book is incredibly slow. A lot of time is spent setting up the foundation of where our main character gets her worldview from and how that relates to her environment. A lot of it makes sense and I like that there is a practical reason why she sees herself as unremarkable when her brother and mom have made so many accomplishments. But it takes way too long to set up something so basic. It takes time away from generating chemistry between our main character and the prospective love interest. The story pulls it together in time towards the end, but I would've liked to see those developments sooner rather than later. I would still say give it a shot if you enjoy meta setup with your shoujo romances but go into it expecting a slow burn.

To us long-time shoujo fans, Diary of a Female Lead brings a lot of charm. In the author comments, creator Yuu Yoshinaga notes that the story was inspired by her own life raising three children as a shoujo manga artist, even if the characters bear no resemblance to her real-life middle schoolers. Once I knew this, it became plain to see in how the characters interact, both with the meta-commentary on shoujo manga, and in the mother's relationship with her children and her work.

It gives the story a nice groundedness and a sense of real affection for the peculiarities of the demographic and its audience as opposed to, say, Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun, a manga I adore with all my heart that also has grounding in the author's experience but a more satirical sense of humor. The heart of Diary of a Female Lead comes from an affection for a distinctly shoujo point of view: “Every girl is the protagonist of her own story,” Betsucomi's motto. As the characters explain, that doesn't mean you have to be interesting or special to be a protagonist; you simply have to keep moving forward with your own goals and motivations. That alone makes you the protagonist of your own life and worthy of affection.

It's a sweet sentiment, especially for a story about using fiction as your lens to interpret the world. Moments can turn a bit too saccharine, especially when the teens imitate shoujo manga without a trace of irony. Sincerity is important, but it's easy for things to get mawkish. Jokes about the teens acting like real teens with social media and school and clubs, or about their mom and her struggles as a creative professional, help to keep the flavor a bit more balanced.

There are two prerequisites for enjoying Diary of a Female Lead: a love of shoujo manga, and an appreciation for metafiction. If you have those down, you'll find a lot to love here.