Holiday Review #6: I DON'T KNOW WHICH IS LOVE

 OK, that's enough heavy stuff.  We need to move on to something lighter, something more frivolous, and something much, much gayer.

I DON'T KNOW WHICH IS LOVE (Dore ga Koi ka ga Wakaranai), by Tamamushi Oku.  First published in 2021 and first published in North America in 2023.

PLOT:

Mai spent her high school years pining for her best friend, only to get shut down on graduation day.  She's not going to make the same mistake again in college.  This time, she's absolutely going to get herself a girlfriend!  Her first day on campus is beyond successful, as she runs into five hot women who are all interested in Mai.  With such a selection before her and no experience with dating to draw from, how is Mai ever going to be able to choose?

STORY:

I cannot believe it took us this long to get a yuri harem series.  It feels like an obvious idea, considering how much manga fans at large like looking at cute girls.  Why not swap out the boring old Potato-kun for yet another cute girl to give a stale old genre a fresher, queerer new look?  If anything, I Don't Know Which Is Love is a great example of what a good harem manga can be.  Instead of boring, rote, and uncomfortably horny, this series is lighthearted, cheeky fun that (mostly) doesn't cross the line of good taste.

A lot of credit goes to Mai herself.  There's something about her combination of pent-up horniness and naivite that reminds me of the title character from the Kase-san series.  The big difference is Mai knows her sexuality from the start and is old enough to act on it (even if she doesn't quite know the specifics yet).  Her inner monologue is hilariously blunt about just how easily Mai's head is turned by all these women, a bluntness that is helped along by Leighann Harvey's translation.  Yet it's there where her personality shines brightest as a lovable dork paralyzed by the banquet of choices set before her and her own innate desires.

It's easy to see why Mai is so overwhelmed for choice when her newfound harem is equally charming.  Instead of gimmicky -deres, Oku takes some of the more common yuri character archetypes and fits them into roles one might find on a college campus.  He also gives them a particular focus or fetish themed around one of the five senses.  Thus, the princely barista/sound tech Minato is drawn to Mai's voice while the extroverted actress Karin has an oral fixation that manifests as an intense love of food and a tendency to kiss everyone in reach when she's drunk.  These quirks blend rather seamlessly into their personalities, making them feel a little more well-rounded as characters.  

Unlike a lot of harem manga, this one fares quite well when it comes to consent.  Mai is horny, but she doesn't creep on her newfound bevy of beauty in the way many of her male counterparts do.  Why would she, when they all come to her first and make the first moves?  Most of them are good about waiting for Mai's explicit approval before taking things beyond kisses and the odd groping, although I do wish a couple were a little more prudent.  

As good as resident psych professor/secret romance novelist/wanna-be sugar mama Maria is at getting Mai to articulate her desires, but she's definitely old enough and smart enough to know that hitting on students is ethically a bad idea.  Mai's scent-obsessed roommate Kaoru makes a bad impression when her first scene has her stripping Mai nude while asleep and sleeping with her in Mai's bed before the two have even greeted one another.  She gets to show some other sides of her after that, but she's by far the most hands-on of the harem and the most impulsive about it.  Those reservations aside, it was nice to actually have fun reading a harem instead of feeling like I was trudging through it out of reviewer obligation.

ART:

Oku's art is a perfect fit for the story's vibes.  The character designs are perky and distinct, even if they do have a bit of same-face syndrome and there's not much distinction between older characters like Maria and the college-aged ones.  Fanservice-wise, there's nothing more risque here than a few racy imaginings of some of the girls in bras and some simple, featureless breasts.  Most of the comedy takes place inside Mai's head, but Oku does manage to get some amusing lovestruck looks out of her.

I also have to note how much I love the cover design.  Mai's face, the lipstick-like font, superimposing the girls' faces on her nails - it has a fresh and femme style that's both eye-catching and perfectly captures the tone of the manga inside. 

RATING:

I Don't Know Which Is Love is the first harem manga in eons (yuri or otherwise) that actually made me smile while reading it.  There are a couple of questionable characters, but it's not enough to spoil the saucy good times going on here.  I can only hope that it can keep this sort of energy up and that we can see even more yuri titles over her like this one.

This series is published by Yen Press.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 3 volumes available. 1 volume has been released and is currently in print.

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