Normally we here at the Manga Test Drive spend February looking at bad romance manga, but after this last year we need something of a break from badness. Let's spend this month looking at strange romances instead! And what could be stranger than a shojo manga about a girl falling for a literal australopithecine?
PRIMITIVE BOYFRIEND (Genshijin Kareshi), by Yoshineko Kitafuku. First published in 2017 and first published in North America in 2020.
PLOT:
Mito wants a man as strong and sturdy as her garden, but all the boys in her class are self-centered and weak. She gets her wish when the harvest goddess Spica wants to reward her with her soulmate. The problem is that her soulmate is a 2.5 million-year-old hominid and being with him means Mito has to survive the dangers of Pleistocene-era Africa!
STORY:
In her author's note, Kitafuku notes how this story grew from a number of small ideas: a pure romance, time travel, a farm girl in the big city, and so on. I'm not 100% sure how that turned into this particular premise, but truly original premises in shojo are rare so I'll take what I can get.
I do like how this story values how strong and capable Mito already is. Her friends might encourage her to act more stereotypically weak and feminine to land herself a man, but Mito refuses to compromise herself and that's a very admirable quality. Of course, no modern human is strong and capable enough on their own to deal with things like Ice Age predators, so it doesn't feel egregious or hypocritical when she finds herself needing her proto-human soulmate (nicknamed Garhi, after his species name) to save her.
Of course, it's kind of weird to fall in love with a creature that's still more ape than human, but Kitafuku certainly tries to make that as palatable as possible. She hobbles the competition by making all the modern hot guys self-centered and weak. They are clearly meant to be parodies of some of the usual otome guy types, from the smug womanizer to the shy otaku. That said, Garhi's whole strong and silent thing can only go so far, considering he doesn't have things like 'a concept of language.'
All that said, as someone with an anthropology degree and someone with a long-standing interest in paleontology, Kitafuku's loose and fast approach to history drove me a little nuts. I wanted to give her a little credit for making her story revolve around a fairly new species of hominid and making its status as an evolutionary dead-end a plot point. But then she populates this world (which ostensibly Africa, based on the savannahs and jungles seen and where fossils of A. garhi have been found) with creatures that weren't found there. Yes, there were saber-toothed cats in Africa, but not ones that look like the Smilodons she's drawing! Woolly mammoths wouldn't have been found alongside Deinotherium, and neither of them on that continent! Was that a freaking Archaeopteryx I saw in one panel? I realize that asking for scientific rigor in a goofy shojo manga about a girl and a monkey-man is kind of ridiculous, but sometimes it's the little things that can throw you right out of the story.
ART:
Kitafuku's art is a little rougher and less cute than you typically see in shojo art today. This is most obvious in the faces, with their long squashed rectangle mouths. It doesn't help that everything is so busy: the backgrounds, the panel layouts, the sound effects and shojo sparkles layered over it all. Most of the emphasis is on the action, but they're put together in such a scattershot matter that it's hard to follow just what is going on. It's only when she lets things calm down that any sort of charm can come through, something that's made all the more evidence in the side story.
PRESENTATION:
Kitafuku's debut story, "Giselle's Flash," is included here. It's the story of a hapless teen ballerina who overcomes bullies at the dance studio and every sign pointing to her having no real talent for ballet through the usual hard work and perseverance. It's OK.
RATING:
I want to go along with what
Primitive Boyfriend is trying to offer, but I don't think it was poor research alone that put me off of it. It feels like it should all be a big joke, but I don't think this series is quite sure what the punchline should be and the mangaka doesn't have the art skills to make it cute or funny or even all that interesting visually. It's just
there, being neither weird enough to recommend nor bad enough to fully shun.
This series is published by Seven Seas. This series is complete in Japan with 3 volumes available. All 3 have been published and are currently in print.
