The Spring 2020 Manga Guide

Something's Wrong With Us

What's It About? 

Nao loved sweets as a kid, and she loves sweets now. In fact, it is her dream to one day be one of Japan's top confectionary makers. But behind this sweet tooth lies a dark secret. As a child, Nao and her mother, also a sweet maker, lived and worked for the prestigious family-run shop Kogetsuan. Nao was friends with the family's heir, a child her age named Tsubaki. At least, until Tsubaki framed her mother for the bloody murder of his father. Her mother did not survive long afterwards, and ever since Nao bas been unable to gaze upon the dark hues of the color red. But Nao has found a letter from her mother, one that claims she was innocent, that she was framed.

To uncover the dark mystery, Nao reingratiates herself into the ancient house of Kogetsuan, only to find an older, far crueler Tsubaki and even greater darkness. Tsubaki, after all, has inexplicably offered Nao a proposal of marriage. And though she hates him with all her heart, there is something about him, an evil allure that seems to consume and corrupt her. Will Nao find the truth? Or will the dark temptations of Tsubaki and his confection empire plunge her into the same pit that swallowed her mother?

Something's Wrong With Us is an original manga series by Natsumi Ando. It is published by Kodansha Comics, retailing for $12.99 physically and $7.99 digitally. A live-action adaptation is set to premiere in July.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Faye Hopper

Rating:

I don't know what to make of Something's Wrong With Us. Admittedly, this is partly due to not knowing the premise going in. Here I am, reading the first half of the chapter and expecting a cutesy manga about the delightful art of Japanese bean-paste confectionary, and then, murder and an innocent scapegoat and blood everywhere. But I am not sure it was just lack of expectation that was so jarring. I also think that the dissonance between the prominent focus on sweet-making and the grisly whodunnit of the main plot is so badly navigated that I am not sure what this series even wants to be.

In a better series, this contrast would have an underlying purpose (here is just seems like it just exists to put the protagonist, Nao, in a place of even deeper despair and unhappiness—otherwise known as misery porn) or feel like it was a part of the same story, but here the effect is of having three series—one about a young girl rising to the top of sweets-making business, one a murder mystery about how the affluent trample over and exploit those of the lower classes, and the last an abusive, Fifty Shades style ‘romance’ played for titillation—being slammed together and clashing like the loud clang of cymbals. I guess it could be argued that the sweets being tainted by the tangy steel of blood and betrayal is deliberate irony, but to what effect? All it seems to do is plunge Nao even deeper into a toxic yet ancient family hierarchy in a sham marriage without saying anything about, like, hereditary wealth toxifying family relationships or how society believes the wealthy and the powerful over anyone else. The two Nao's (one the bright and buoyant girl who loves sweets, the other cold and calculating mystery-solver) don't even feel like the same character. What is the point of this?

Since the ending of the volume escalates into emotionally abusive territory (with Tsubaki destroying one of Nao's commissions and activating her trauma trigger because she lied to him or something), I am extremely comfortable giving it a hard pass. It feels less like psychological exploration or an eerie mystery than simple, gross fetishism. Maybe that's the point I'm missing.

That all of this exists for the same reason so many romances about the taboo and the luridly offensive exist; because sometimes those topics can be alluring and, in the most deft of cases, actually be attractive while recognizing what is bad and unsustainable. Something's Wrong With Us does none of this (it is not certainly not sexy by any measure, only baffling and actively upsetting), and it does none of this so badly that I am still trying to figure out what I just read.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Natsumi Ando is a very hit-or-miss creator. ARISA was a wonderful twisty mystery until the last two volumes, Wild @ Heart a cute romance, and Zodiac P.I. was decent fun, although neither of those last two were anything spectacular. (She only did the art for Kitchen Princess, so I'm not including that in my assessment.) Something's Wrong With Us marks a departure in that it stars adult characters acting vaguely adultish, but it does still have the flavor of her teenage targeted works, and that may or may not end up working out, especially since she seems to be taking an “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to the plotting.

The base narrative definitely has potential. Nao's mother's death while she was on trial for the murder of Tsubaki's father left Nao not just orphaned, but with a wound that she can't allow to heal, something which is exacerbated by the Mysterious Man giving her a letter from her mother declaring that she was framed. That Nao's mom was framed isn't exactly a revelation; the real question is who put Tsubaki up to doing it when he was something like six years old and who the real killer is. Given that Ando's no Agatha Christie, I'll be very much surprised if it doesn't turn out to be Tsubaki's truly unpleasant mother, a woman who could give Cinderella's step-mom a run for her money in the evil and manipulative departments. What's interesting is the way that Nao decides that turnabout is fair play by accepting Tsubaki's haphazard offer of marriage so that she can be at the scene of the crime with access to all of the family and business documents. Is it a smart move? Absolutely not. But it is a good one for moving the story forward.

It's when Ando veers from this straightforward mystery narrative that things get sticky. Both Nao and Tsubaki's family businesses are traditional Japanese confection, and while the images of the sweets and the making of them are fascinating, but they don't really add anything to the story, and the fact that Tsubaki has grown up from a thoughtful and lovely child into a raging ass is doesn't help either, although it is presumably meant to add tension to the story. And yes, given the parent who raised him, Tsubaki has every right to be a horrible person, but at this point it just feels like another trope thrown in to make Nao's life even more difficult, with the added bonus of making the romance plot unpleasant. Ando's art is lovely and easy to read and the glosses in the back are some of the more informative, plus I'm morbidly curious, so I'll likely read another volume. But it's already shaping up to have some of the issues that sunk ARISA, so consider yourself warned.