Kou Fumizuki

On his way to catch a train, Kaoru Hanabishi comes across a lost, naive young woman named Aoi. She's decided to find her childhood sweetheart and marry him, and she soon realizes that Kaoru is the one she was looking for. She becomes determined to stay with him and be his wife, but, unfortunately, her family won't hear of it. For the sake of her powerful family's reputation, she must marry someone from a family with similar standing. Kaoru was once the Hanabishi heir, and if this were still show more the case he could marry Aoi. However, things have changed since they were children, and Kaoru is determined never to go back to the Hanabishi family.

Aoi is what I imagine many young men's fantasies of the perfect woman are like. Although she's virginal, gentle, shy, and sweet-natured, she can become blushingly sexy at the drop of a hat, and she always knows just the right moment to become naked. I don't know any real women who are at all like her, but I suppose that's not the point. Judging by this first volume, Ai Yori Aoshi is romance for older teenage boys, and romance is often idealized.

Judging by Kou Fumizuki's page in Anime News Network, Ai Yori Aoshi is likely his first published series, and it shows. The way characters are drawn is inconsistent and sometimes a little off. Fumizuki uses what I personally think of as the "Escaflowne style of noses" - when you see characters a little in profile, their noses are long and sharp, with a little blunted bit. It's not a style I like, but I grew to like the story in Vision of Escaflowne enough that I got over my reaction to the noses. However I feel about the noses, Fumizuki does manage facial expressions pretty well, which is important for such an emotional series.

I think I'm too much of a woman to ever really like Ai Yori Aoshi - Aoi is too much of a sexy wet washcloth for me to like her, and Kaoru only barely starts getting developed by the end of the first volume. However, I can see why young guys might like this series. There's plenty of fanservice (in the form of nudity in the story, as well as provocative poses, nudity, and the suggestion of nipples through cloth on some of the chapter title pages), the cliched boob-grabbing joke you see pretty much everywhere in this genre, and the ordinary guy who gets the starry-eyed affection of a beautiful woman.

(Original review, with read-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

Let me just start by saying that I really like the broad plot of the series, and I love watching the relationship between Kaoru and Aoi develop. However, this volume suffers horribly from being in the serial that it was originally published in. Young Animal's demographic seems to have had demands that unreasonably forced unnecessary and even idiotic single-dimension characters into the series. In this case, it comes in the form of an awfully thought-out new character who exists more as a show more plot device than as a human. Meanwhile, in another decision that seems to be a product of the marketing demographic being seinen by nature of being in Young Animal, important conversations and plot connectors are set unreasonably in settings lending themselves to fanservice. All in all, I didn't like this volume. It had some wonderful moments of tender romance, but most of this volume felt like filler intended to stretch the series rather than enhance or further it. show less

This is a graphic novel I picked up on a whim when I was in fire school. I've always been a sucker for a quality non-girly romance manga, and this first volume has some pronounced cultural differences from the western world. What resonates with me so much in the story is that it is a story of true love, despite hardship and opposition. There are certainly some elements of Japanese culture that come through that I could stand to do without, but Fumizuki-sama does an excellent job with the story.

A volume that focuses primarily on the main plotline, thankfully. Villains that will piss you off, characters that will restore your faith in humanity, and finally chapters that are necessary to the story's progression instead of throw-away one shots that don't really matter in the long run.