Review: YAKUZA FIANCE

 Perhaps the hardest thing about this month is finding romance manga that are messed-up enough to fit the theme but aren't awful.  

This year, I managed to find one.

YAKUZA FIANCE (Raise wa tanin ga Ii), by Asuka Konishi.  First published in 2017 and first published in North America in 2022.

PLOT:

Yoshino is the granddaughter of an Osaka-area yakuza clan, but all she wants is a normal life.  That's why she's so frustrated when she learns from the local tabloids that she's being engaged against her will to Kirishima, the grandson of a Tokyo clan.  

At first, Kirishima seems too good to be true: handsome, polite, and attentive.  Then the mask slips and the real Kirishima is revealed, a cold, cruel, sadomasochistic enforcer.  At first Yoshino is frightened, but then resolves to scare him off with a stunt of her own.  Who could have guessed that it would backfire and that Kirishima would end up genuinely smitten with her as a result?

STORY:

All too often on this site I've ranted about romance manga where every excuse was made to justify the worst dudes possible, all while the heroines cowered before them or hope that their innate goodness would be enough to tame them.  Yakuza Fiancé is NOT one of those stories, and I could not be more thankful.  I think it's because of two things:

1. Kirishima is legitimately messed-up.  This isn't your typical Asshole-Kun who uses his parental issues and/or emotional constipation to justify his bullying ways.  We haven't got all the details on Kirishima yet, but it's clear that a lot has to happen for a 12 year old to willfully join his uncle's gang and to move up enough in the ranks to be working as an enforcer before he's out of high school.  He's also gotten disturbingly good at compartmentalizing this side of himself and playing the role of the perfect boy when needed.  Even his love confession is messed-up, being equal parts a declaration of love and a request for Yoshino to hurt him.  Konishi does not romanticize this in the slightest, leaving the reader to squirm in discomfort alongside Yoshino as we learn more about him.

2. Yoshino herself.  While this is a seinen manga, Yoshino herself is not all that different from your average shojo heroine.  She struggles with her looks (mostly because she inherited her grandfather's sharp features).  She struggles with loneliness, as not only does she had to deal with the usual gaggle of mean girls threatened by her proximity to Kirishima but also the loneliness of moving to a larger city far away from her family. She legitimately struggles with her feelings towards Kirishima as well.  She's not immune to feeling flattered by his attentions at first, but she's also legitimately frightened by his dark side and legitimately annoyed by his post-confession clinginess.  What really makes the difference is that when her back is to the wall, Yoshino shows some true mettle.  She choses not to cower in fear, but to try and meet his level of freak with some of her own by faking the sale of one of her own kidneys and handing him the cash in the middle of class.  It's a bold choice to say the least, and like Kirishima himself it was the moment I knew I was going to love her.

ART:

The first thing that caught my eye about this series was its character designs.  They are curiously but not unpleasingly stylized, with long proportions and equally long faces with angular features and fairly simplified faces.  This stylization is balanced out with fairly realistic bodies (particularly the hands) and a lot of attention to fashion, but that realistic body language gets paired with some pretty wacky wild takes.  This should feel like a tonal clash, but somehow Konishi makes it work.  The paneling is smart too - it's not flashy, but it gets the most out of the give-and-take between Yoshino and Kirishima and is good at building mood and then shifting that mood on a dime.  

RATING:

Yakuza Fiancé manages to expertly navigate the line between trashy romance and legit romantic drama through sharp character writing, an intriguing visual style, all while not romanticizing the twisted dynamic between its leads.  If you want a bad romance done right, this series is a perfectly good place to start.

This manga is published by Seven Seas.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 8 volumes available.  All 8 have been released and are currently in print.