Although Your & My Secret won't appeal to everyone's tastes, it's a lot more entertaining than I expected from its goofy high-concept premise.
Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:Ai Morinaga
Translated by:Yuya Otake
Adapted by:Jay Antani
What They Say
Nanako Momoi is the belle of her high school... just as long as she stays quiet. Once she shows her true self, however, guys' dreams are shattered because she is a tomboy! Meanwhile, Akira Uehara has the looks and brains, but his personality is so dull nobody notices him. One day, Nanako's grandfather comes up with a crazy invention and Nanako and Akira end up trading personalities! Can they keep a secret?
The Review
Packaging:
The print quality is good overall. The standard disclaimers about $10-level paperback manga still apply; a few of panels with solid-black backgrounds showed some slight banding. The only extras are a two-page manga afterword and a preview page from Volume 2.
Artwork:
The art is clean and consistent but otherwise unexceptionable. That's not really a bad thing here, since all the story needs is functional art and Morinaga more than delivers in that respect. Interestingly, even though the series was published in a shonen magazine in Japan, there are some shoujo-style touches to the artwork like flowers and sparkles in the backdrops.
The artwork is printed strictly in black-and-white, though a few pages look like they were converted from full-color shading to grayscale.
Text/Translation:
Antani's English adaptation reads fine. There's one distracting line where a character says "BF" out loud instead of "boyfriend", but otherwise the script flows well. As is typical of Tokyopop releases, Japanese SFX are left unaltered and untranslated. The English dialogue retains honorifics.
Contents (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
A compelling plot isn't one of the strong points of Your & My Secret's first volume: in fact, plot is so secondary to the series that Morinaga whips through the manga's setup phase in one short chapter. This first chapter introduces the reader to the series's two central characters, high-school students Nanako Momoi and Akira Uehara, who are respectively notorious for being a tomboy and a pushover. Uehara volunteers to deliver some papers from school to Momoi's house, where he's lured into a human experiment by her quack grandfather Manzo Momoi. Manzo claims to be experimenting with shrinking people as a way to conserve resources; but when he flips the switch on his "shrinking" machine, it makes Momoi and Uehara switch bodies instead.
Okay, I'd be exaggerating a little if I said that was the entire plot of the book from start to finish. In reality, there're a few ongoing plot threads involving all kinds of potential romantic pairings among Momoi, Uehara, and their respective best friends Shiina and Senbongi that fill out the rest of the book. These threads kick off when Momoi quickly latches onto the idea of dating women (she flips between blaming Uehara's male hormones and just claiming it's fun) before realizing that she can have a romantic relationship with her friend Shiira. When the two officially become a couple, Senbongi starts pursuing "Momoi" (now Uehara in Momoi's body) really aggressively, claiming that he's always been interested but backed off before in deference to Uehara's feelings for Momoi. Uehara is much less cavalier about this situation than Momoi, since he's still interested in dating Momoi despite the narcissistic implications. (If this all sounds convoluted, trust me: it's much simpler when Morinaga draws the pairings out on the page.)
There's also technically an ongoing plot thread about Uehara getting Manzo to repair his body-swapping machine so he can restore Momoi and Uehara to their rightful bodies. I say "technically" because that part of the plot doesn't really advance much in this volume: Manzo turns out to be an ingrate who openly demands bribes to fix his machine and then spends the replacement parts budget on himself. While it's all pretty funny (and actually one of the most entertaining parts of this volume) the machine isn't getting any closer to being fixed by the time Volume 1 ends.
Comments:
Your & My Secret is turning out to be a fun read overall, but you have to be willing to turn your brain down a notch to get the most out of it. The whole setup is awfully implausible if you overanalyze any part of it, like why Momoi and Uehara would keep the body-swap a secret rather than just telling people what happened. But really, the plot's not here to tell a solid and coherent narrative: it's there to drive some funny gender-bending gags and associated fanservice.
Did I mention the fanservice? Unfortunately, this volume's biggest shortcoming is that Morinaga sometimes lays the fanservice on so thick that it dilutes the rest of the comedy. I don't really care for fanservice one way or another (I'm starting to think I have some kind of genetic immunity to it), so sometimes it felt like I was just flipping through long series of panels that didn't add anything to the humor and could have been used for something more entertaining. On the other hand, if you like mildly ecchi fanservice (there's a lot of implied sexuality -- some of it blue enough to push the boundaries of the book's "T" rating -- but no explicit nudity) then consider that a plus.
Even with the excessive fanservice, Morinaga's comedy is fast-paced enough that I thought the whole volume was pretty consistently amusing even when it wasn't being laugh-out-loud funny. While "amusing" isn't really enough to propel it into must-buy territory for everyone, genre fans with a taste for lowbrow humor will want to give this release a look.
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