Review: KINIRO MOSAIC

Sadly, not all yuri (or yuri-adjacent) manga can be as interesting as Mushroom Girls In Love.  Some are simply about blandly nice girls having blandly nice fun in an attempt to be blandly funny.

KINIRO MOSAIC (Kin-iro Mozaiku), by Yui Hara.  First published in 2010 and first published in North America in 2016.

PLOT:

Alice Cartelet is an English girl who loves Japan so much that she decides to move there to attend high school.  There she is reunited with her old friend Shinobu, who stayed with Alice's family while studying abroad and who is equally fanatical about all things European.  Together with their friends, Aya, Youko, and Karen they struggle with cross-cultural misunderstandings along with all the usual pleasantries of high school.

STORY:

Kiniro Mosaic is something of a throwback to a decade earlier, when 4-koma manga about a gaggle of teen girls doing cute and/or wacky things in the vain hope that they could either turn into an Azumanga Daioh-style hit or at least score an anime adaptation in the process.  Of course, that means it comes with all the downsides of that particular genre and time.

4-koma manga works best with a well-defined cast of characters, a snappy sense of humor, and a knack for good punchlines.  Yui Hara misses the mark on all three.  All of these girls have basically one or two traits, and none of them are particularly novel or funny.  They're simply too nice to make fun of one another or be made fun of, and that leaves the humor feeling rather toothless.  

If you're in it for the potential yuri content, then there's not a lot to grasp on to here.  There's obvious hooks for such couplings, especially in the intensity and obsessive feelings that Alice and Shinobu share.  Yet Hara never really commits to any sort of romantic pairing, leaving it all vague so that the reader can fill in the blanks as they please.

The only thing Kiniro Mosaic has going for it is the cross-cultural exchange.  Alice and Shinobu are essentially weeaboos for one another's cultures: full of youthful excitement over what they see as exotic new cultures, but having only a shallow and often misguided knowledge of them.  While the jokes themselves are fairly gentle, it does at least provide a solid footing for some observational humor and something vaguely resembling an identity.  

ART:

Since this is a 4-koma comedy manga, the only thing the audience cares about is the character designs and they are all just....ok, I guess.  They're all cute in a fairly generic sort of way, and their expression don't tend to stretch too far to preserve that.  Sadly, Hara doesn't seem to have any particular skill for visual gags.  That's a problem in a genre with such limited and rigid panel space to work with, as it further limits what already is a pretty dull book.

RATING:

Kiniro Mosaic is too banal to commit to anything but vague cuteness.  It doesn't work as humor, it doesn't work as yuri, it just simply exists.

This series is published by Yen Press.  This series is complete in Japan with 10 volumes available.  All 10 have been published and are currently in print.