It's a Valentine's Day edition of Stuff I Like, featuring what is probably my favorite romantic-comedy of all time: My Wife is Wagatsuma-san!
Something special for this special day: a romantic-comedy I absolutely adore. By writer Yuu Kuraishi and artist Keishi Nishikida, MY WIFE IS WAGATSUMA-SAN ran for 13 volumes in Kodansha's Weekly Shounen Magazine from 2011-2014 and deserves to be much more widely-known in the west than it is.
Many casual manga fans may be surprised to find a rom-com in a magazine best known for series like FAIRY TAIL, and for being a competitor of Shueisha's Weekly Shounen Jump Magazine, hardcore manga fans know that rom-coms are a staple of shounen manga and WAGATSUMA-SAN is one of the absolute best.
Picture this: Hitoshi Aoshima, a second year in high school, is one of his school's biggest losers - he's not good-looking, athletic or smart. He's consistently near the bottom of his class and he only has a few friends (who often don't seem to like him very much). What Aoshima does have is the power to travel through time - though only ten years into the future and only for a few minutes at a time. And he's kinda not good at controlling it. But what he sees during his very first jump is amazing: not only does the kid nobody thinks will ever have a girlfriend (or graduate high school) have a nice home, and a job, but he's married to Ai Wagatsuma - the most-popular, hottest girl in his school!
Sounds pretty good, right? The rub: Aoshima knows absolutely nothing else about his future nor does he have any idea how to make it come about. Is he on the right track to that dearly-desired future? Is there something he needs to do to make it happen? That's what this manga is all about - and it's absolutely hilarious.
Using clues he sees to his future, and obtains during brief, awkward conversations with future-Ai, Aoshima sets out to make this future come true, taking bits and pieces of information he gleans and trying to apply them to the present (such as Ai's secret love of low-budget TV dramas that she's afraid to share with anyone for fear of ridicule) to win over Ai with often-hilarious results. His friends (collectively known as the Dx Corps) are in on Aoshima's secret, but think he's nuts and are pretty out there themselves and spend as much time hindering and/or making fun of Aoshima as they do helping him.
Along the way to his future, Aoshima and company have many of the standard high-school manga storylines (school trips, school festivals, etc), but the writing is so outrageous (and loaded with more pop-culture references and puns than anything I've ever seen before; Ai Wagatsuma's name, in fact, is a homophone for "Love my wife") that it doesn't at all feel like retreads of old plot tropes. And the fact that Aoshima's future changes with each trip to the future, based on things he's done in the present, keeps you on your toes as the story's direction can change literally at a moment's notice as Aoshima sees he's done something wrong or differently (such as finding himself married to a completely different classmate at several points).
MY WIFE IS WAGATSUMA-SAN is one of the funniest, sad-sack-sweet things I've ever read and it keeps you guessing until the very last moment. The series ends in such a way that--- Well, read it yourself. You'll be glad you did.
Many casual manga fans may be surprised to find a rom-com in a magazine best known for series like FAIRY TAIL, and for being a competitor of Shueisha's Weekly Shounen Jump Magazine, hardcore manga fans know that rom-coms are a staple of shounen manga and WAGATSUMA-SAN is one of the absolute best.
Picture this: Hitoshi Aoshima, a second year in high school, is one of his school's biggest losers - he's not good-looking, athletic or smart. He's consistently near the bottom of his class and he only has a few friends (who often don't seem to like him very much). What Aoshima does have is the power to travel through time - though only ten years into the future and only for a few minutes at a time. And he's kinda not good at controlling it. But what he sees during his very first jump is amazing: not only does the kid nobody thinks will ever have a girlfriend (or graduate high school) have a nice home, and a job, but he's married to Ai Wagatsuma - the most-popular, hottest girl in his school!
Sounds pretty good, right? The rub: Aoshima knows absolutely nothing else about his future nor does he have any idea how to make it come about. Is he on the right track to that dearly-desired future? Is there something he needs to do to make it happen? That's what this manga is all about - and it's absolutely hilarious.
Using clues he sees to his future, and obtains during brief, awkward conversations with future-Ai, Aoshima sets out to make this future come true, taking bits and pieces of information he gleans and trying to apply them to the present (such as Ai's secret love of low-budget TV dramas that she's afraid to share with anyone for fear of ridicule) to win over Ai with often-hilarious results. His friends (collectively known as the Dx Corps) are in on Aoshima's secret, but think he's nuts and are pretty out there themselves and spend as much time hindering and/or making fun of Aoshima as they do helping him.
Along the way to his future, Aoshima and company have many of the standard high-school manga storylines (school trips, school festivals, etc), but the writing is so outrageous (and loaded with more pop-culture references and puns than anything I've ever seen before; Ai Wagatsuma's name, in fact, is a homophone for "Love my wife") that it doesn't at all feel like retreads of old plot tropes. And the fact that Aoshima's future changes with each trip to the future, based on things he's done in the present, keeps you on your toes as the story's direction can change literally at a moment's notice as Aoshima sees he's done something wrong or differently (such as finding himself married to a completely different classmate at several points).
MY WIFE IS WAGATSUMA-SAN is one of the funniest, sad-sack-sweet things I've ever read and it keeps you guessing until the very last moment. The series ends in such a way that--- Well, read it yourself. You'll be glad you did.
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