彼氏彼女の事情

KARESHI KANOJO NO JIJOU

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
21
RELEASE
February 24, 2005
CHAPTERS
108

DESCRIPTION

Yukino Miyazawa has it all - perfect grades, looks, the admiration of her peers. She's the #1 student at her school... at least she was until he showed up. The new boy, Soichiro Arima, one-ups her in every department. And the worst thing about it is that he's sincere! With her ego in jeopardy, Yukino will do whatever it takes to regain the spotlight, but falling in love was never part of it.

(Source: Tokyopop)

Included one-shots:

Volume 1: Tora to Chameleon: Yakusoku wa Isshuukan (The Tiger and the Chameleon: A Promise for One Week)

Volume 4: Ashita Mata Mori de Aou ne (Meet Me Again Tomorrow in the Forest)

Volume 8: Abareru Ousama (The Raging King)

Note: Includes 4 extra chapters from volumes 2, 10, 11, and 12.

CAST

Yukino Miyazawa
Soichiro Arima
Tsubasa Shibahime
Hideaki Asaba
Pero Pero
Maho Izawa
Tsubaki Sakura
Kazuma Ikeda
Tsukino Miyazawa
Hiroyuki Miyazawa
Kano Miyazawa
Reiji Arima
Aya Sawada
Miyako Miyazawa
Rika Sena
Takefumi Tonami
Yusuke Takashi
Yumi Ikeda
Toshiharu Shibahime

CHAPTERS

RELATED TO KARESHI KANOJO NO JIJOU

ANIME ComedyKareshi Kanojo no Jijou

ONE SHOT ComedyAbareru Ousama

Cover Art for Tora to Chameleon: Yakusoku wa Isshuukan

ONE SHOT DramaTora to Chameleon: Yakusoku wa Isshuukan

Cover Art for Ashita Mata Mori de Aou ne

ONE SHOT FantasyAshita Mata Mori de Aou ne

REVIEWS

HidamariSeashore
93/100
Fantastic story with wonderful character development and artwork.
Most, if not all, people go through a phase of self-discovery. They may try to act as if they are someone who they really aren't, but someone may break down those walls that hide who you really are. Is this person the one you love? Well, probably! Well, with that being said, this manga is one that I've been wanting to read for quite a while, and by alternating between reading online and checking out volumes of it from the local library, I managed to read it all of the way through. I have to say, I made the right choice.

Ladies and gentlemen, queens of vanity everywhere, here is my review of the long-running manga, Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou (Kare Kano, for short), known in English as His and Her Circumstances.

Yukino Miyazawa is seen as a perfect girl by her classmates, but in reality, that's not how she's like; she just acts that way as a way to get attention. That's why when she enters high school and a boy named Souchirou Arima takes her "number one" spot, man, is she ticked! If that wasn't bad enough for her, her secret is discovered.... by Souchirou, of all people! However, Yukino comes to discover that she and Souchirou have more in common than she thought, and they end up becoming friends and eventually lovers. Kare Kano is basically what happens as the two of them fall in love and finally reveal their true selves to everyone else.

The story of Kare Kano.... it was FANTASTIC! It starts off cute and fluffy, but it later becomes quite deep. There was quite a great amount of character development, especially for Yukino and Souichirou. Yukino may seem like a despicable character at first, but she's actually a fun protagonist to follow. Souichirou, her love interest, was probably even more interesting, though; he had a very deep backstory, and it's pretty obvious that he cares for Yukino. Besides Yukino and Souchirou, there are quite a few supporting characters. For example, Asapin, a friend of Yukino and Souichirou, was a very funny character, and although I didn't like Tsubasa (who used to like Souichirou) at first, the character development she got me to like her.

Let's not forget the artwork, though! Masami Tsuda was the one who both wrote the story and drew the artwork for this manga, and she did the art as great as the story. The artwork was very well-drawn, the character designs were solid, and the chibis that pop up every now and again are very cute. Honestly, there is no way I can really describe the artwork, but I really mean what I say when I say it's great artwork for a great manga.

Yes, I know that Kare Kano has an anime adaptation; I knew about it before I read the manga. I'm really excited to start watching it, and the manga just made me even more excited! I'm just going to say that overall, Kare Kano was a great manga. I'd recommend it to any and all romance fans looking for a great story with wonderful character development matched with solid artwork. It really shows you that you should just be yourself, because even if most people don't accept you, there will always be someone who will.
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unspecifieduser
30/100
Trite drama, clumsy art, and an overall lack of meaning. The characters are caricatures, not people.
Kareshi Kanojo spends most of its story bland and forgettable. It briefly becomes so ridiculous that it’s hilarious, only to end abhorrently.

The characters are remarkably shallow. Oh, they have “depth” that comes in the form of tragic backstories and internal self-hatred, but it’s all paper-thin. They aren’t believably flawed human beings. They’re perfect caricatures that exist for the reader to fantasize about dating them, and their “flaws” only exist to make them feel like troubled emo bishonen that a good girl can surely fix.

Miyazawa, the girl, has less of this issue, though she isn’t particularly interesting. If she was any more bland than she already is, I’d call her an intentional blank slate for the reader to slot themselves into. The story started with an interesting hook for her personality — an egoist who wants to maintain a facade of perfection to impress her peers. But this is only temporarily maintained for the initial drama for her to start dating Arima, and a brief arc of her being bullied. Past that, she essentially forgets that this was ever part of her personality, and settles into a forgettable lack of traits. You could call it character development, but she develops into someone with nothing interesting about her. Near the end of the manga she essentially stops having any relevance to the plot at all.

Arima is the bigger problem. He’s so perfect it’s hilarious. #1 test scores in the country, kendo prodigy, likeable and lovable by everyone. His only flaw is that he believes himself to be a terrible person, for hiding the fact that he’s a terrible person from those around him. Notice the circular logic? Not all characters need to be perfectly rational, but the internal conflict should be at least believable.

It reminds me of another manga, Kaguya Wants to be Confessed to. Kaguya feels like it took heavy inspiration from Kareshi Kanojo on several fronts. But it’s also much better written, and understood how to balance its perfect-seeming protagonists out by making them inwardly flawed in realistic ways. Arima feels like both of those characters wrapped into one perfect person without any of the realistic drawbacks to that lifestyle.

If all you want out of it is an enjoyable fantasy of a perfect, darkly troubled bishonen boyfriend, then I don’t begrudge you that enjoyment. I don’t personally think it holds up as well written.

Visually, it’s not particularly well made either. The art goes through three stages. The early art has extremely messy and hard to follow paneling, with way too many small (and weirdly narrow) panels crammed into single pages, and way too much dialogue crammed into those panels with very little flow. It was tiring to read. Luckily, past the beginning, the mangaka apparently got much more experienced with the art of making a readable manga, and it settled into a mediocre average. In this phase, the main thing I’d criticize is the extremely repetitive character designs. The mangaka blatantly had very few character design ideas to actually draw from, with many characters having the same faces and extremely similar hairstyles, differentiated only by hair color and height. There were countless points I mixed up the main girl with a temporary rival, or the main boy with the main girl’s father or another girl in the cast. If characters aren’t immediately distinguishable at a glance, then something’s clearly wrong.

The art improves in the final stage, but I’ll talk about that part of the manga later.

During those first two stages of the story, the plot is mostly bland. After Miyazawa and Arima settle into their relationship, it has a collection of arcs focusing on various other couples. Most of those are about as bland as the main duo’s romance, and I won’t say much about them. Though there’s a bit of a problematic romance between a high school girl and a 28 year old man. But that's another thing I’ll talk about later.

Most of the drama during this stage of the story is, yet again, shallow. There are far, far too many misunderstandings borne purely of miscommunications. There are ways to make the resolution to that kind of thing satisfying, when they finally do communicate, but here it mostly felt arbitrary and forced. I also never found this manga funny. There was very little drive to keep reading.

Later in the story, it improves… kind of. The art definitely gets better, with the occasional impact page that has solid shading and composition. This is where Miyazawa completely stops mattering to the story — now, it’s all about Arima, and his tragic backstory. The backstory itself isn’t that poorly written, but I’d laugh at the idea that this makes this story “dark.” It’s written to make Arima more of a caricature, the boy who’s oh so perfect yet is so darkly troubled. It’s dark in an edgy teenage way. All of the drama centering around his belief that he’s a bad person, because he was abused as a child, is just nonsensical.

What’s a little more compelling is his relationships with his birth parents, which have a little more basis in truth, in the desire some adopted people have to gain some sort of connection to the people they never knew. It’s not awfully written, I’ll say that much for it. It does, however, lead to an absolutely ridiculous climax. It’s like the story goes from an extremely boring soap opera, to an spicy, over the top, hilarious soap opera. I’ll give this part of the story credit for having the guts to go crazy.

After that, things get problematic. This is where I have to spoil a couple things, though I’ll try not to go into detail. Spoiler warning.

In its epilogue, the manga starts to seriously idealize certain ideas, and I’d call it genuinely harmful of it to do so.

The first is how it idealizes teenage pregnancy. Shockingly, there’s only a single character who has a realistic reaction to this reveal. Everyone else is happy and supportive. I won’t say it’s outright impossible for a teenage pregnancy to be handled in a mature way and for the involved parties to all grow up fine. But even with characters as “perfect” as the protagonists of this story, it comes off as incredibly tone-deaf and problematic to treat it as a perfect situation with no concerns. I guess it’s “believable” in this story since there’s rich grandparents supporting them through it, but realistically, I honestly don’t think this is a good message to end on, for shoujo readers to internalize or believe.

The second is to do with Asaba’s ending. He’s Arima’s best friend, a womanizer who never found the girl right for him. Somehow, when he finds out that Miyazawa’s baby will be a girl, he goes through a strange thought — that this girl will be his soulmate. I genuinely gaped when reading this, going over the last few pages, certain I must have misunderstood something. I didn’t. In the epilogue chapter it makes it clear. Their daughter falls in love with Asaba, and he “resists” this weakly, essentially acknowledging that he’s going to “give in” because he loves her too much.

This is not an okay thing to condone in fiction. I don’t care if you think that cases like this are okay because “the child wanted it.” Minors are not capable of making that kind of decision, full stop. Art does not exist in a vacuum. When you write something like this into a story, treating it like a positive, you influence your readers to think it’s an okay thing, to not be as careful as they should about not falling into abusive situations. If you read this and were smart enough to just take it as a story and not be influenced by it, then I’m happy you reacted to it properly. But that does not make it an acceptable thing to write.

These abhorrent moments are at least small, near the end. The vast majority of the experience has nothing to do with it. And normally, I would have given that experience a 4/10. Because of the way it ended, it gets a 3/10 instead.

But by and large, even without the awful ending, it’s not a manga I’d recommend. It’s uninteresting, unfunny drama, with poorly written characters. It feels like what Kaguya is making fun of, rightfully, and has none of the self-awareness. If you want to read a good shoujo, go read Glass Mask.
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1Waz
100/100
.."Whether rain or wind it wont matter, from now on nothing can come between us"...
"__my dream is to die thinking, wow that was fun im tired" "thats right our lives are just starting to get interesting"__.
karekano: his and her circumstances is an appealing shoujo romance drama about a multitude of characters intertwined by their numerous circumstances. After the seemingly impetuous ending of the anime series i became interested in starting the manga and i dont feel an ounce of regret for what i did. from the attentively developed cast of characters to the tragic psychological drama that becomes more apparent as the story progresses especially in the few final parts of the manga. despite that, still managing to provide a lot of heart for the reader to relish in. this heart-warming narrative will take you on an emotional feels trip of love, anger,friendship, hatred,sucess, exaltation,frustration, truth,lies, hurt,salvation, greed,generosity, degradation and rebirth.

now lets talk about the main couple yukino miyazawa and shouichiro arima. miyazawas narcissistic personality is something i can relate to, she is a self concious ego maniac that would do a whatever and whichever little thing that can be done if its to deserve praise from someone and create the perfect model student image at school. you can define this personality as twisted, you could even call it admirable. a hard working person is always worthy of commendation. Subsequently, arimas stimulus is a more honest one well.. not exactly. to become more mature, to live up to the standards of his aunt and uncle, to avoid the scorn of his family he strives for perfection. However, he has a dark past bottled up inside of him that enabled him to create "an other self" within him. little does he know that sealing a box in his mind weighing it down and sinking it into the deepest part of his memory whilst deceiving others would come back to bring him suffering later on. "he" and "she" promises each other to be true to themselves after they become a couple but it did not go so well for him as it did for her. Arima confronting the darkness inside of him is one of the highlights of the manga and i think is a very engaging part of the story.
__"I dont understand it" "i dont understand it" "this girl loves me so much so why dont i feel happy?" "is it the more she loves me, the more my heart turns dark and evil?"__
i haven't read as much shoujo romance before but this is definitely my favourite, karekanos romance takes a different approach of maintaining their status as boyfriend girlfriend rather than giving more time for both of them to actually explore their love for each other. This is a good thing to implement in the story on account of most romances that tend to be dragging their story as much as they can. also, its not like being in a relationship cant develop the romance between characters. Being a couple can develop their romance even further since your partner is the one you are most close to and overcoming trials and turbulence with each other would surely strengthen their bond. besides yukino and arima, there are other compelling character relationships, but most of them are likeable and relatable because of their flaws and the difficult circumstances or situations they are put in that we as an audience can empathise ourselves in fact of how real they seem.
__"if only i could be released from that hatred i wouldnt have to climb these stairs anymore"__
The art is... not so good but it does get slightly better over time. Masami Tsudas art on how she draws character faces becomes a lot more veristic in later chapters but unfortunately with the site im reading the scans are more unseemly so im not able to enjoy it as much. there are some beautiful moments in the manga that dont require any excessive dialogue to seem meaningful such as the subtle changes in character expressions that speaks volumes or aesthetic landscapes assorted with beautiful soliloquy and i commend Tsuda for that. She also excels at portraying mental illness and adolescence despite a portion of the series being too melodramatic with arimas descent into madness though how he subjugated his dark self was satisfying so not much to complain about. the manga also delves into much deeper things like age gap romance, child abuse and suicidal tendencies. it also somehow glorifies teen pregnancy which i dont really support but i guess the characters handled it pretty well.

i would also like to take advantage of this opportunity to talk about the anime. Earlier, i mentioned how abrupt and rushed the anime ending was. Thats true but the start of the anime was really good and anno hideakis chaotic directing, extensive portrayal of characters thought and emotions and heaps of symbolism seems to fit quite well with the series in spite of being a slice of life romance. unfortunately, the studio was running out of budget and the mangaka wanted it cancelled because it was veering off from the tone the manga had. you can also see a alot of effort was put in to the opening it looked really great the ending however were just live action shots of a school or something idk i skipped it.
__"I was drawn to him, he pulled me in like no one id known before everything about him was exotic.. and exciting"__
I would highly reccomend this to people who are infatuated with character driven stories and shoujo romance fans. The conclusion was great and just what i hoped for. its the book of youth and contains hapiness, pain,confusion and all things that people go through high school life.
"__all of the spirals in this world" "without knowing how much time we have, we fumble" "and swim through lifes murky waters"__
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