Manga Thoughts: Ao Haru Ride

Last year, I admitted here how taking some mild and curious interest in being shipped two cartons at once from Right Stuf turned into surprise on opening the second box to find scattered volumes of manga I hadn’t ordered. I contacted the company but, after not getting back definite “please mail the unexpected items back to us” instructions, succumbed to temptation and kept the manga. I do hope that whoever actually ordered it got things worked out for themselves. It didn’t take long until I’d ordered the volumes of Asadora! I hadn’t been sent by accident; even this unconventional pointer to another series by Naoki Urasawa was quite acceptable. The other series sampled in the misaddressed box, Ao Haru Ride by Io Sakisaka, was just sort of there to begin with. From the “Shojo Beat” logo on the spine I could suppose it a “romance for high school girls” series. “Now what could I possibly have against that?” comments do bump up against an awareness I can’t think of much undeniable shojo manga I’ve read in recent years beyond having got to the forty-eighth volume of Skip Beat!, and the thought “that story isn’t set in high school” might mean a little more than it should to me. From there, the thought sneaks up on me sometimes that my next closest exposure to the genre is the core joke of the long-rambling Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun, where a “generic high school girls’ romance manga” is being drawn by an unlikely artist and his just as unlikely assistants.
( Eventually... )