There is always a time in everyone’s life when we get deceived by appearances and we try something out only to see it was absurdity packaged in a nice wrap. This is the case with Kouya no Koi, a seemingly coming of age story at the tender age of 12; learning about your body, learning the ways of the world, learning about the other sex and of course learning about love. Love is practically the answer to everything in this case, however convoluted it gets.

Where to begin with this? My experience with the manga can be summed up in a single scene: 12yo main girl keeps falling more often these days and her house’s helper takes her out bra shopping. Why did she do that? Because apparently her normally growing breasts made her fall forward and a bra would fix that. That is honestly the logic that permeates the work. For bonus points, in another scene, the 12yo main girl explains she hates being touched and an adult woman tells her that as a woman she will be touched by her romantic partner and she will give birth, so she needs to face her fears because that is what a woman is. I mean, is that not how you are supposed to advise a child who has such a fear? In yet another scene, a 13yo girl who is a stranger shows off her bra randomly to the 12yo main girl and other girls in the school grounds (and not the lockers room) just to tell her she is going to buy underwear that matches the taste of the boy she likes. What was the main girl’s reaction? “Her bra is so mature.”

These have only been examples of how everyday things get a completely irrational spin to serve the purpose of entering teenhood. Everything feels forced after the first few chapters, the story revolves only after love in the most absurd of ways, everything keeps happening so the main girl can keep asking herself the same questions over and over again, the romance is idiotic at best with almost everyone falling for her at some point, most adults are laughable but are still trying to sound all pretentious because they are talking with a 12yo girl who supposedly does not know much and in general, it reaches the point that you read just to see how worse it gets. I will admit it had some cute/nice scenes, but they get lost under the sheer quantity of horrible treatment.

The characters are not thought out well at all. The main girl starts as an ordinary girl to a bit smarter girl to a complete idiot in a matter of seconds. I kept trying to convince myself that she is really young and thus, she is learning a lot of things, but that would only get me this far, because a lot of things did not make any logical sense, other than “What is love?” in every other corner. In general, everyone’s character that we see is all about love and nothing else so at most we see some pretentious problems and illogical thinking.

All in all, I laughed a lot while reading this. Thankfully, it was short enough so I do not regret wasting my time this much, but if I knew, I would never even glance at it. It was the art that pulled me in and that is where I can give a high score, but everything else was ridiculously bad so I cannot let art affect the final score much. This is more or less a warning for everyone who is thinking of reading it.