Holiday Review #20: YOU CAN'T BLUFF THE SHARP-EYED SISTER

 These last few years have been great one for Natsu Hyuuga, mostly due to the incredible success of The Apothecary Diaries.  This year we started to get some of the manga adaptations of other works she's written, so naturally I had to check this one out myself.

YOU CAN'T BLUFF THE SHARP-EYED SISTER (Seijo ni Uso wa Tsujinai), based on the light novels by Natsu Hyuuga and character designs by Chiho Shinishi, with art by Yo Asami.  First published in 2023 and first published in North America in 2025.

PLOT:

In the land of Mythos, select young women are born with powers known as "charisms" that grant them great beauty and supernatural powers.  Chloe is a novice at the church with an eye for money and a knack for gambling, so much so that handsome, noble young paladin named Erald believes she possess a charism.  Chloe is skeptical of both him and his claim.  She has no magical gift - she's just good at observing others!  Regardless, Erald needs a woman of her skills for a very specific purpose: to investigate a murder.

STORY:

I'm trying so hard to be fair to You Can't Bluff the Sharp-Eyed Sister.  I can't spend this entire review comparing and contrasting it to its successful predecessor.  While both this and Apothecary Diaries are mystery series at heart, Sharp-Eyed Sister has a more fantastical setting.  Mercifully, this one seems to take more from D&D than video games, considering the references to both clerics and paladins.  This means it also allows for the incorporation of magic in the form of the charisms.  Even then, it's not the flashy elemental magic so many of us associate with fantasy settings but something closer to enhanced senses.  

The nature of the mystery is also different, being not a poisoning or anything remotely pharmaceutical in nature but instead a straightforward murder.  It's not quite a closed room murder, but the fact that it happened within a well-protected religious enclave with no witnesses beyond the murderer and the wee woodland creatures makes it a genuine challenge for Chloe to solve.  There's also the matter of our leading couple.  Chloe is a fairly socially adept young lady, even if her greed is easily exploited and we get hints that her skill for gambling and observing were were born from a traumatic childhood with a father or guardian who gambled.  Erald makes a good foil for her, as he's decidedly unafraid to use his family's money and high status to aid his goals but remains cagey about precisely why we wants Chloe to solve this particular murder.

That being said, it's hard not to find the echoes of Maomao and Jinshi's dynamic in that of Chloe and Erald.  She's the snarky skeptic who solves mysteries using her very specific fields of knowledge, while he's the high-ranking pretty boy with the financial and political means to motivate her.  Neither of them are seeking romance from the outset, but it's clear that the audience is meant to read (if not hope for) some of that tension in their interactions despite the presence of Erald's chambermaid Ines.  It also wasn't lost on me that both Chloe and Maomao are sent to all-female enclaves of noblewomen to investigate these cases.  Natsu Hyuuga had been writing The Apothecary Diaries for over a decade when this series originally debuted, and it's clear that series was still very much on her mind even as she tried to break away from it.

ART:

Based on what I can find, Yo Asami sticks pretty closely to the look of Chiho Shinishi's original illustrations.  The character designs are virtually identical, and those designs were already pretty pleasant and uncomplicated in the first place.  Still, Asami is no half-assed amateur, having gotten their start on a couple of (unlicensed) Seraph of the End spinoffs.  While their pages and panels are not terribly ambitious, everything from the characters' poses and movements to the backgrounds are polished and professional.  They even manage to draw a horse-led carriage well!  Indeed, there's a lot of good attention to detail here from the scruffiness of Chloe's hair to the embroidery on much of the formal robes and dresses we see on display and it's something I wish more stories in this vein had.

RATING:

Sharp-Eyed Sister can't entirely escape comparisons to its author's best known work, but I think it manages to make a decent case for itself.  It didn't capture my interest quite as swiftly as The Apothecary Diaries did, but I can see it easily appealing to fans of that series as well as those who want some lady-led fantasy that doesn't involve any sort of reincarnation, villainesses, or otome game tropes.

This manga is published by Kodansha Comics.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 5 volumes available.  1 volume has been released and is currently in print.

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