Writer Teika and illustrator Ham’s 2023 light novel series The Delinquent Girl Beside Me Suddenly Dyed Her Hair Black has been adapted into a manga by artist Waka Sanada. And One Peace Books will be officially bringing that manga to English-speaking readers on October 13. The high school romantic comedy revolves around misunderstood “tsundere” girl Kei Shimizu’s fumbling efforts to get her boy classmate Daiki to look her way. Although privately “dere-dere,” sweetly lovestruck, Kei’s outward standoffish and curt “tsun-tsun” personality makes getting close to anyone difficult for her.
The manga opens by introducing high school boy Daiki Hondo, a considerate sort of everyman who treats everyone fairly and doesn’t believe in stereotypes and rumors. When asked by a friend, Daiki responds that his ideal girl is one with long black hair. The next day Daiki’s blonde classmate Kei Shimizu comes to class with her hair pure black. Although she’s rather socially awkward, and Daiki is slow to pick up on Shimizu’s fumbling efforts at courtship, the two youngsters gradually spend more time together and get to know each other better. The first manga volume is pretty straightforward and conventional. The story is narrowly focused on Daiki and Kei. Daiki’s school friend Shunya plays a very small role. Kei’s older sister is introduced as a supporting character. No other characters in the first volume have enough presence or impact to be significant.
Visually, Waka Sanada’s illustration is attractive. Character designs are soft and refined, creating a very polished, practiced visual design. As typical of mid-tier manga, background art is minimal but serviceable. Readers entirely new to manga or particularly romantic comedy manga may find Delinquent Girl Beside Me Suddenly Dyed Her Hair Black to be an excellent gateway. The book functions as an excellent primer of the traditional tropes and aesthetics of school romance manga and what makes such storytelling different from conventional Western comic books. But most veteran manga readers familiar with the tsundere archetype and typical school romcoms are likely to consider Delinquent Girl Beside Me… overly conventional, familiar, and even a bit uninspired.
Although not dealbreakers, the first volume of Delinquent Girl Beside Me… manga contains a number of compounding small and subtle weaknesses. These problems begin even before the manga itself does. The title The Delinquent Girl Beside Me Suddenly Dyed Her Hair Black, is clearly expressed from Daiki Hondo’s perspective; however, the story is not told from his perspective. The very first page of the manga begins with Kei Shimizu narrating, revealing that she is the story’s protagonist and point of view character. But even though the storytelling follows Kei, it still limits how much Kei reveals about herself. On one hand the narrative technique may be praised for allowing readers to make their own inferences. At the same time, the technique may be criticized. If the story is going to show Kei Shimizu’s private moments and thoughts, why only selectively share some of them? Moreover, the story regrettably lacks even the most basic “will they or won’t they” suspense. The very first page of the manga establishes that the story is a flashback. So readers already know from the outset that eventually Kei & Daiki will get together as a couple.
A few more thematic flaws weaken the book. Daiki basically identifies himself as dull and uninteresting. The manga eventually tries to give him some depth of characterization, but it doesn’t try very hard. As a result, Daiki comes across as a flat, one-dimensional character. Minor supporting character Shunya Matsuoka is even worse, as he seems to exist solely as a cog in the exposition machine. His dialogue exists strictly to create opportunities for the two primary characters to opine. Especially through the first two chapters, original writer Teika seems to struggle with developing a consistent characterization for Kei Shimizu. Kei’s personality feels all-over-the-place. She alternates from aloof to aggressive to demure to shocked to bossy to embarrassed to evasive all within moments. Initially she’s unaware of Daiki’s social standing and suspicious of his personality even though chapter 4 contradicts this depiction of Kei’s consciousness. The dialogue in the first chapter, especially, is periodically a little jumpy, making the train of conversation difficult to follow. The readers gets the impression that writer Teika was finding sea-legs this early in the story.
A bit of uneven-ness also applies to One Piece Books’ localization of the manga. The book cover credits original character designer phonetically as “Hamu” while the book’s first page credits the artist as “Ham.” Dialogue frequently switches fonts and sizes. One Peace Books’ manga translations sometimes do this to emphasize inflection or intonation. In this book the switches of text font seem more arbitrary, thus more distracting. The manga’s original color first three pages are rendered in monochrome in the translation. The book contains the manga’s first five chapters with no supplemental pages or material. The manga contains no significant objectional material: practically no foul language, no violence, no nudity or sexual references.
As an adaptation of Teika & Ham’s 2023 rom-com light novel series, Waka Sanada’s manga adaptation of The Delinquent Girl Beside Me Suddenly Dyed Her Hair Black is a lovely looking and competent effort. No aspect of the magna leaps out as appreciably bad. However, the source narrative, Teika’s original story, feels a bit bland and uninspired. The story feels less like Teika had a compelling story to tell or a compulsive desire to tell this story and more like the author simply took advantage of an opportunity to write a safe, conventional, predictable narrative. I certainly wouldn’t discourage anyone from reading The Delinquent Girl Beside Me Suddenly Dyed Her Hair Black manga, but it’s also difficult to aggressively endorse such a prosaic story.
