The Spring 2024 Manga Guide

Anyway, I'm Falling In Love With You.

What's It About? 

It's 2020, and Mizuha's seventeenth birthday is the pits. Her dad forgot, the sempai she likes isn't interested, and her social calendar is getting cleared out by a mysterious virus. But when her longtime childhood friend asks her out, Mizuha has to sort out what this change could mean. And her feelings may not be the only ones changing...!

Romance stands up to a global pandemic in this series about how to maintain the hopes and joys of high school life when everything is upended. But romance is resilient, and crushes and confessions flourish among Mizuha's friends. A brand-new school love story from the author of I Fell in Love After School!

Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You. has a story and art by Haruka Mitsui. English translation by Melissa Chiam/amimaru.This volume is lettered and retouched by Juan Marcos Rivera/amimaru. Published by ‎Kodansha Comics (March 5, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

The hardest change is the kind you don't see coming. That's something Mizuho is rapidly discovering in the spring of 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to rear its ugly head and at least one, if not two, of her childhood friends is ready to stop holding back and admit that he has romantic feelings for her. It's a double-whammy blow to a girl whose life had just been sailing along as it always did. Among other things, Haruka Mitsui's manga seems to imply that while both incidents would have shaken up Mizuho's world regardless, the two of them coming on each other's heels sends her into a tailspin.

It isn't hard to see why they might coincide, however. Things start to derail when Mizuho learns that because of a strange new virus, an important meet for her high school's swim team has been canceled, and the disappointment has caused one of the third years on the team to quit. Since Mizuho has had a crush on him for a while, she slips an ill-advised confession into the mix while trying to console him, and when he rejects her, she's at least a little heartbroken – and maybe a small, superstitious part of her thinks that he did because her plan of confessing after he won at the now-canceled meet fell through. But her confession has another repercussion: one of her childhood best friends, Kizuki, panics that his meet-dependent confession plans are gone and just up and kisses her. Add in that all of these things happen on Mizuho's seventeenth birthday (which her father has forgotten), and it's not hard to make a case for her to feel like it's the end of the world.

What's striking about the opening chapters of the first volume is that it shows how so many things are linked to the "normal" progression of our everyday lives. It's something that many of us have had to learn to adapt to as the pandemic has gone on, with even promising news often feeling tempered with a "but" or "unless" that seems all too possible, but for people looking forward to promised landmark events, that feeling maybe even worse. Every generation of students as far back as Mizuho can trace was able to have sports meets, go on school trips, and follow a very specific pattern of events, and it feels not just unfair, but wrong that she and her friends can't have those things too. It creates in them an urgency to do more or to make up for their lack however they can, as we see not just in the spontaneous confessions of love but also in things like camping out in Mizuho's driveway in an attempt to make up for not going on a class trip to Hokkaido. This may not be an absolute stand-out in its genre, but it's also good enough to merit picking up if you need a new romance with plenty of complications.

Is It Worth Reading?

That panel perfectly sums up how I feel about this first volume. At first glance, Anyway, I'm Falling in Love with You. feels like a story that hits all the generic beats of a reverse harem. We have an airhead girl growing up with conventionally attractive childhood friends; naturally, at least some develop feelings for her. But even when they are practically screaming their affection in her face, she is insistent that nothing is going on. The first half of this volume annoyed me because it felt like it was leaning too strongly into the airheadedness of your typical romantic comedy lead. When you have a love interest kiss you and confess that you're the world to them, and your only response is that they were probably messing with you when there has been no evidence of them ever doing that, it's hard for me to find you interesting as a character.

Thankfully, it gets better as we explore some of those relationship dynamics more thoroughly. There is this underlying theme of how other people perceive us and how, sometimes, the closeness that we feel towards someone may end up proving to be a detriment more than a benefit. There's this whole idea of how hyper-focusing on one thing could lead you to neglect or ignore the obvious that's in front of you. It's not a bad message to come to towards the end; it just didn't start on the best foundation.

This isn't just a message that applies to the romantic relationships between characters. It also applies to world-building. One of the selling points of this manga is that it revolves around the fallout that happened during the COVID-19 shutdowns. I don't think any character says the word "COVID," they just vaguely allude to the fact that a disease went around that caused a lot of things to shut down. This affects the lives of some characters looking forward to certain events, like athletes who might have been training for months to prove themselves, only to graduate without ever participating in the sports events. That's an interesting story that can be explored, but it gets overshadowed by the aforementioned romance. It's a shame that it feels like all of these interesting ideas don't start congealing together till the final quarter of the book, where it ends on a pretty egregious cliffhanger.