The Fall 2022 Manga Guide

Mission: Yozakura Family

What's It About? 

Taiyo Asano is a super shy high school student and the only person he can talk to is his childhood friend, Mutsumi Yozakura. It turns out that Mutsumi is the daughter of the ultimate spy family. Even worse, Mutsumi is being harassed by her overprotective, nightmare of a brother, Kyoichiro. Taiyo will have to take drastic steps to save Mutsumi.

Mission: Yozakura Family has story and art by Hitsuji Gondaira, with English translation by pinkie-chan, and Viz will release its first volume both digitally and physically on October 18

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Mission: Yozakura Family may not be SPY x FAMILY, but that doesn't mean it isn't fun. The story, in fact, has a solid goofy base to build on, as our sad, hapless, and anxious protagonist Taiyo learns to overcome all of those things and becomes a stronger, more self-confident person…via spy training, of course. Because naturally his childhood friend Mutsumi comes from a family of superspies, and just as naturally he has to marry into it in order to prevent her psychotically obsessed oldest brother from killing him. You know. Just another day at Shonen Jump.

Actually, the premise is the least interesting part of this volume. It's at its best when it's leaning into the sillier aspects of things, like how many spies are openly on social media (there's a great gag about one who just can't stop tweeting) and that there are spy trade magazines that just come in the mail. Mutsumi's family isn't quite as good as they could be, although in all fairness we really only get to know two of the brood, the aforementioned older brother and one of her sisters, Futaba. Futaba is a Gothic Lolita powerhouse who's also the only person who really embraces Taiyo when he wanders in. And Taiyo needs that – we see in a flashback that he lost his entire family in a car wreck when he was in middle school, and that's resulted in some serious attachment issues. It's a serious plot thread that's handled surprisingly well, albeit a bit overdone in places. But when we see a glimpse of him pre-crash in middle school, we can really understand how much it affected him, and during the storyline that makes up the back half of the book, the sight of a child in trouble recalls his younger brother – and shows that unlike most of the Yozakura family, Taiyo is motivated more by his heart than the mission.

Comparisons with SPY x FAMILY are probably inescapable, and there really are some distinct similarities in the series' attempts to blend family with espionage. But if you go into this expecting more typical shōnen action fare you're unlikely to be disappointed. It's simply fun, and I have to admit that the Yozakura family dog's design made me chuckle each time he showed up. It's not innovative, but it's definitely a good time.

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Christopher Farris

Rating:

You only get one chance at a first impression, but in the world of ongoing Shonen Jump manga, you often have the opportunity to turn things around even after a rough start. Mission: Yozakura Family stumbles pretty hard out of the gate, tackling the idea of an underworld-involved family of espionage experts (a setup that is now a genre, it seems), but fails to present it in a focused, engaging way for the incoming reader. Main character Taiyo's incidental initiation into the titular family begins with a blip of an occurrence that just sort of crashes into the premise. The supposed entertainment here appears to be seeing our boy dropped into the midst of all the various wacky family-member characters being shown off, except those characters are given relatively little to do outside of continuously dumping loads of exposition about their situation, how their family structure works, and sudden contrivances that necessitate Taiyo being drafted in the way he does.

It's clunky, and doesn't really deliver on the kind of entertainment value it's shooting for, culminating in a messy fight against the always-'appreciated' Weird Overprotective Pervert Older Brother character. The subject of those dueling affections, female lead Mutsumi, chafes under that role; having to be 'protected' in-story due to her complete lack of ability or talent thanks to the plot's odd take on Spy Genetics, she exercises most of her agency in terms of declaring who she wants to be taking care of her for a given time. It all means that there's not much appeal to Mission: Yozakura Family's opening chapters to hook readers in, with even the action coming off unclear a lot of the time as we struggle to keep up with all these just-introduced family members and their distinguishing abilities.

As much of a baffling blitz at the beginning as all that can be, this volume does seem to very gradually iron itself out over its course, still continuously explaining things and taking multiple training arcs in getting there. Seeing that sort of deliberately-pursued growth in Taiyo becomes the manga's main reward, as even with some patented anime acceleration to his results, they still come off as believable and earned in the context of why he's reaching for them. I don't yet buy the depths of his and Mutsumi's immediately-connected contrivance-marriage, since their emotional resonance is entirely based around her simply being nice to him after his own family died, but I can see the idea this one might be reaching for as it continues on further. As well, that focus on Taiyo's developing abilities lets the book lead into a more effective page-turner once a more proper arc gets going in its second half. And some of the supporting family members we get to know along the way, like the tiny twin-tailed brawler Futaba, do turn out to be fun. There's potential for payoff here, bottlenecked only by your personal patience to wade through its mess of a first impression.