Reiroukan is genuinely one of the most baffling series I’ve ever read. There’s honestly a beauty in that. Every truly awful manga is bad in its unique ways, and Reiroukan is one of the most unique I’ve seen. The art is great, the character designs stand out, the premise is decent (mostly), and the story decisions are some of the most confusing I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t feel like what an incompetent would come up with. It feels worse. You’d have to be trying to make something this stupid. It makes you wonder if the author, once realizing they were probably going to be canceled, decided to just fuck around.

And despite that, the author, Tomi Akihito, has genuinely grown since then. Let’s put this into context. I found Reiroukan because of a manga called Sinner of the Azure Abyss. A manga which has even better art and one of the most promising beginnings I’ve seen. It’s one of those manga that feels incredibly interesting and entirely natural, like the author lives and breathes manga. It only has eleven chapters translated at the time I write this, but I enjoyed those chapters greatly and am really excited for where else it will go.

Because I enjoyed it so much, I decided to read all of the author’s older work. I didn’t expect anything as good as Azure Abyss, of course. Most authors take some time to grow into their skills, and I’ve seen plenty struggle greatly before figuring out what they’re trying to do, producing garbage in the meantime. But this is a ratio of early garbage to later genius I haven’t seen since Oshimi Shuzo. I am honestly proud of Tomi Akihito for not giving up and polishing their craft after producing schlock such as this.

So let’s dig into Reiroukan itself. Our manga begins with our protagonist, whose name I already forgot… okay, it’s Genta. He moves into a fancy mansion known as Reiroukan to dorm in while studying in college. There are a fair number of other students there, although it’s not full. Honestly, the premise is already strange. You’d think a place so fancy and beautiful would have a waiting list, but no, he has to be convinced to move in. Something he only decides on after seeing an attractive girl changing — but I’ll say more about that later.

The fundamentals of the premise are solid. A group of college students living together in a beautiful environment, getting into wacky hijinks and goofy shenanigans. Now that I type that out, I realize that this could have been a breath of fresh air compared to all the high school slice of life out there. Unfortunately, the first problem this manga has is that its ideas for episodic plots simply aren’t very good.

The feeling I got during the early chapters was a mostly benign confusion (as opposed to the active confusion later on). The plots don’t explicitly not make sense, but they tend to flow awkwardly and make you forget what’s actually supposed to be happening. And whenever the author can’t fill the page time with things actually happening, we get fanservice.

For instance, Chapter 2 has eighteen entire pages of two girls in a room together changing outfits and talking about nothing, only for the actual plot of the chapter to be… the main character fell asleep after drinking a glass of wine and the other guys moved him under the bed in the girls’ room, so he was there the whole time. That gets a whole six pages.

Similarly, there’s a bathhouse chapter that just has some of the girls being naked together in a public bathhouse, with the actual plot mixed in between so sparsely that I was, again, genuinely confused by it. The mansion’s bath broke and they had to fix it, I guess?

Other chapters just don’t really have anything happen. Chapter 5 has a blackout, and… that’s it. Yeah, there’s a blackout. They need to get candles. Nothing else really. Oh, except the B plot where one of the college students is tutoring a ninth grader who simps for her, and she’s so scared of the dark that when he says he’ll protect her and wants to date her, she actually agrees. Yeah. This is not a great manga. (To be fair, after the blackout ends she becomes sane again and says she’s not going to date a ninth grader… at least not until he’s older? Yikes.)

But let’s go back to Chapter 2 for a moment. The one where the main character was stuck under a bed while two attractive girls were changing. Don’t you think that’s an odd thing to happen in the second chapter of a series? The first chapter has Genta touring the house, meeting people, and agreeing to stay there. You’d think in a series like this, with an ensemble cast, the second chapter would involve him spending more time with and interacting with at least one of the members, as we start to flesh them out. But instead, it’s drawn-out fanservice where nothing happens at all.

That’s a trend for this manga. The character designs are great. Distinctive, memorable, lots of personality conveyed just through their art. And that’s about all the personality you’ll get out of them. It’s not that they’re theoretically boring characters. It’s that the events of the plot never actually serve to bring anything out of the characters.

Chapter 3, for example, follows Genta on a wild goose chase trying to find Youko, the caretaker. Oh yeah, I should mention another part of the premise. At the end of chapter 1 he hears that Reiroukan is going to be gone in a year. Unlike a normal person, he doesn’t immediately ask a question about that — it goes unacknowledged for most of chapter 2, and then chapter 3 has him following a trail of Youko’s insane antics. It doesn’t even end with him finding her and actually getting to ask something. The charade is pointless, as most of the chapters are plotless.

But eventually we do get confirmation that Reiroukan will be demolished because the company or family or whatever that owns the land needs to build something else there to not go bankrupt. (You’d think that they’d do fine if they charged more than $300 per month rent, or that people would want to live in a literal mansion enough for the demand to drive that price higher — not that I support landlords, mind you, it’s just that this premise doesn’t even make sense.)

It’s unfortunate for Reiroukan to be lost. It genuinely is a beautiful piece of architecture, at least to my amateur eyes that know nothing about mansion design. But regardless of how it looks, the manga won’t let you forget that it’s beautiful, as it spends much more time using Youko to tell you that Reiroukan is important and shouldn’t be destroyed than it does showing you.

And this is where the framing gets weird. I understand why Youko is heartbroken about it, having poured her life into taking care of it and the students living in it. I even understand why she rejects historical preservation or turning it into a museum out of a belief that it’s meant to be a place for students to live together.

But it’s really not the biggest deal in existence. It makes sense as something for a character to feel, not for it to be their driving motivation and basically their only character trait. I dunno about you, but I think there are bigger problems in the world than whether a bunch of college students get to live together in a mansion. I mean, most of the plot of their drama together would be the same if it was any old dorm.

Like, it’s a nice place. I’d want to keep living there too, and certainly wouldn’t want it destroyed. But it’s just a place. You know what’s more important than the place you live in? The people you live with.

That’s the most obvious, bog-standard, easy theme to go for, and Reiroukan doesn’t. No, in this story the place is genuinely what matters, not the people. After all, you can’t believably make it about the friendships when none of the friendships portrayed seem particularly deep or meaningful.

But I’m being extremely literal when I say they make it about the place. The ending of the manga shows, twenty years after the demolishing of the mansion, how one of the characters has created a television drama about college students living in a mansion together getting into drama. Honestly, it’d be kind of sweet, if I could tell you literally anything about that character or if he did literally anything during the plot beforehand. Anyway, he spends all of his time lamenting that his TV show isn’t as good as the real thing and he misses it. He goes to the old site, which is replaced with a genuinely impressive piece of modern architecture that he completely disrespects, only to find that Reiroukan has been rebuilt?

Yeah, our main character apparently got money. I think he inherited his family construction company? Well, there’s a new Reiroukan. And we get to see Youko arrive and cry tears of joy. Because it’s not about the people or the memories. It’s just about having the nice mansion.

I think a manga about the value of historical preservation would be interesting. They talk about how Reiroukan's blend of western and japanese architecture is genuinely unique. It's a piece of art that would be honestly lost to the world when destroyed. But that's not what this manga is really about. No, it outright rejects that. The real message is that people should have nice places to live. These specific people and this specific nice place, of course. Not people in general.

You can’t make the theme about the people rather than the place when there’s never any real connection between the people. And where this manga tries to portray one is where it truly put itself among the worst manga I’ve ever read.

Let’s talk about the reason I gave it a 2/10. Let’s talk about the romance.

It’s not particularly present during the first half, but there are a few things I skipped over that are relevant. Firstly, when Genta meets his roommate, a certified Youko simp who insists that Genta stay away from her. Genta says not to worry, as he has a girlfriend. I was happy when I read that. Not like, ecstatic, but hey it’s kind of nice to see that kind of dynamic going into a manga. Yeah, I didn’t know what I was in for.

It gets a little strange when Genta looks through a slightly open door and sees our main girl, Mikoto, as she’s changing. Immediately after this, he makes his decision that he’d like to live here. That’s a little odd, isn’t it? Like, he has a girlfriend. We even got a flashback of how much he loves his girlfriend. But he decides to move in because he sees a hot girl changing? I mean, I guess pervert is a character archetype in manga.

The next few chapters keep putting him in positions to leer at the girls. This isn’t impossible to believe characterization, but it feels like he’s being written as your typical lonely single protagonist rather than someone with a girlfriend. Right now, it’s still lulling you into a false sense of security, though. While all this happens, you see Genta developing no relationship with anyone, including Mikoto. He has a few conversations with her, but it’s all superficial.

Everything changes in chapter 7. The plot here is that Genta wants to learn how to cook, and Mikoto is ready to teach him. Causing everyone to freak out, which immediately makes you expect that this is your typical gag of someone who can’t make something edible. But no, the joke here is actually that Mikoto is an incredible cook, so incredible that everyone who takes a bite immediately has a Food Wars level foodgasm and promptly passes out and loses their memory of what happened.

Everyone except Genta, that is, who enjoys it but is otherwise fine. The sheer uniqueness of this trait causes Mikoto to fall in love with him.

I honestly thought it was a gag at first, even for the next couple of chapters. Haha, a character temporarily falls in love with the one who can actually eat her food. Move on. But no, this is literally it. She fucking loves him. Immediately. Instantly. No relationship development beforehand. I’ll take a bland harem protagonist with no reason for girls to fall in love with him over a reason as stupid as this.

Oh, and as she confesses, Genta’s girlfriend walks in to visit him. Only to eat some of the food, and pass out to lose her memory of this. Next chapter, she’s still visiting, and we see Genta and her perfectly happy together, to Mikoto’s frustration.

The plot of the chapter after that is that Mikoto, frustrated with her unrequited love, sneaks into Genta’s room every night, gets naked, gets in bed with him, cuddles, and then leaves before he wakes up. It’s around here I started to wonder why nobody in this manga can act like a human being.

Except Midori, Mikoto’s friend. She hears that Mikoto and Genta have been spending a lot of time together, and catches her in the act. At which point Mikoto loudly confesses her love, and Genta kisses her.

I’m still baffled. Genta has a girlfriend. We see a flashback of how happy they were together. We see them happy together in the present, when she visits. Meanwhile the literal only connection Genta has to Mikoto is that he saw her changing once and is horny for her. Like, his girlfriend is attractive too? Frankly, I like her much better, because she seems like a perfectly normal person, who doesn't do things like sexually assault her crush or fall in love for insane reasons.

This is where Genta starts to come off like a real scumbag. A cheater, of course, which only Midori and one other character are sane enough to call out. But there’s still something off about it. If this was a narrative of a guy finding feelings for someone else while apart from his girlfriend, that’d be an actual interesting drama. If it was just about him being a scumbag, it would frame it more around his libido than it does, and not frame their love as genuine. But instead it just expects you to believe that he’s genuinely in love with this girl after showing none of why, no connection or development between them, and the dumbest reason for her to love him that I’ve ever seen.

I try to just take manga as they are. The character is acting like a scumbag, so they’re a scumbag. But sometimes there’s such a blatant disconnect between what the author is trying to do and what’s actually on the page that it completely takes you out of it. That happens a lot in this manga, with unfunny gags and story beats that fail to leave an impact. Genta genuinely isn’t supposed to be a scumbag, but being written as one anyway, is the worst of it. Along with how it tries to portray their love as something beautiful. I’m starting to wonder if this is all a big joke I’m not in on, if it’s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, if it’s supposed to be a deliberately ridiculous romcom for the hell of it. I doubt it.

The next chapter has Midori spy on him as he breaks up with his girlfriend, a person I genuinely feel bad for. The humor here is supposed to come from him only making her feel worse while attempting to be nice, saying they can still be friends and all, and buying her a goodbye gift. On one level, it just feels mean-spirited, as she genuinely did nothing wrong. I mean, she obviously deserves better, but by all reasonable logic he also should still love her and not feel anything for the random girl he’s barely talked to.

After that, we have another case of the manga taking what would be a one-off gag in any other story and taking it absurdly seriously. After the declaration of love, Youko declared that tenants are not allowed to sleep in each other’s rooms. Only for a wall to accidentally get broken down between their rooms, allowing them to see each other in the night. They try to sneak through, they get caught, and yeah they’re kicked out now. Maybe don’t do the thing that will get you kicked out? I guess horny youths are horny. But the entire reason the hole exists at all is so contrived I’m not even gonna sum it up. The only reason it doesn’t feel like a ridiculously forced and annoying way to get them kicked out of Reiroukan is that there’s no reason to actually care about them getting to stay in Reiroukan after all.

Finally, they go home to visit his parents, to tell them that they want to get a house together. It gets suggested that they just get married, at which point Genta’s mother asks him to say if he’s truly serious about this girl.

And he says he is.

I don’t believe the manga when it says this. It’s just fucking lying to me. This girl who fell in love with him because he didn’t pass out eating her food, and this boy who fell in love with her for literally no reason and broke up with his girlfriend to be with someone he barely talked to on a serious level. I don’t care that the moment is meant to be genuine and heartwarming and he obviously isn’t lying. Unless there were magical timeskips unseen between chapters, they got together a matter of days before this.

The manga is wrong. The manga is wrong about what it is. I don’t know if this is the worst romance I’ve ever read, but it’s definitely the stupidest.

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to give you a play by play of their whole romance. I probably could have written this review with just a quick summary alluding to the fact that the romance is stupid and nonsensical. But I wanted to explain every layer of how ridiculously and unbelievable it is. There are a lot of manga about which people say the romance is awful, and I wanted to make it as clear as possible to you that this is even worse than those.

It feels like a joke. Like it was designed to be frustrating. Genta being serious about his love for Mikoto is the perfect punchline. But I don’t think this manga is in on it, and it spends enough time on other unrelated plotlines that I don’t believe it. It’s not something an author would create just to be stupid. I think it wants you to cry at the end, when Youko sees Reiroukan rebuilt.

It really could have been mediocre. Stick to the premise, drop some unfunny, bland slice of life chapters, and you’re golden. It didn’t shoot for the stars. It shot for a wall and hit an innocent bird. 2/10.

Seriously, though, the author improved so much. Go read Sinner of the Azure Abyss. Failure helps you learn. Does that mean that a failure this bad teaches you even more? I'm not sure about that, but it certainly doesn't mean you can't learn.