So far, I’m having a mixed experience with Kodansha’s digital line. I like Chihayafuru and The Full-Time Wife Escapist (review of that coming soon), but I am not thrilled with A Springtime With Ninjas or Peach Heaven. In a way this is good, because I’m not having to set aside funds for so many digital series!
Peach Heaven treads familiar ground as the hapless heroine Momoko is blackmailed into being a slave to an evil male model – is there any other type of model in shoujo manga? Momoko has taken over her father’s writing persona and is cranking out erotica books in order to support her sick mother and younger brother. She toils on her writing all night, only to fall asleep in school the next day. Her friends think she’s hopelessly addicted to online gaming. Through a series of events that I no longer remember, Ranmaru the male model finds out about her double life and starts blackmailing her. Momoko is forced to bring Ranmaru lunch every day at school, and he continues to berate her for her life choices and makes fun of her for being a virgin.
Of course, various situations come up when Ranmaru has to rescue or intervene in Momoko’s life, indicating that he might be not so terrible after all. There isn’t really any suspense or dramatic tension in this manga. While I generally enjoy trashy romance manga, that’s usually only in cases where there’s a bit of a sense of humor or some over the top soap opera element to the storylines, and I don’t see anyone in Peach Heaven, say, abruptly deciding to become a priest or dealing with the aftereffects of personality-changing hypnotism. I was hoping that Peach Heaven would be another fun guilty pleasure manga, but it is just not very interesting. The rote plotting isn’t really complimented by the art, which is competent but doesn’t exhibit any individual sense of style.
