This Review willl contain spoilers and will not mark them
There is a general tendency to define love with terms that gesture towards some type of transcendental experience. Pursuing compelling portraits of this kind of love, a love often elevated as ‘true love,’ is the common mission statement of Romance as a genre. If I were being more argumentative, I would say Ojiro side-steps this altogether with the emotional restraint she shows in Fujiyamasan wa Shishunki. I don’t think that’s quite right. It would be better to say that Ojiro paints a fantasy of the fantasy.
Kanba and Fujiyama are in 9th grade, their last year in middle school, and they are a classic Tall-Girl-Short-Boy pair that have just started to emotionally adjust to the beginnings of puberty. They’re nervous and, like everyone one of their classmates, overly conscious of every physical body within sight. The boys are classically perverse, and the series opens with an eye rolling creepshot heist that ends with Kanba seeing Fujiyama nearly shirtless before he falls off the side of the building about a story off the ground.
This opening poised the narrative to become one of the hornier rom-coms of its kind, however it quickly pivots its approach to something more sincere and vulnerable. Kanba, finding himself suddenly and powerfully attracted to his childhood friend, asks her to be his girlfriend. She agrees and they date in secret.
After this change, the emotional complexity begins to show through as the two navigate school, quietly watching one another and trying to maintain a convincing, polite distance. Specifically, although Kanba would often joke about Fujiyama’s height, watching the boy’s in his class insult her becomes a central point of conflict. Both of them are way too self-conscious to want to admit to anyone that they love anyone. Both of them are, just a little, embarrassed by who they’re in love with.
This kernel of embarrassment is what separates Fujiyamasan wa Shishunki from other nostalgic Coming-of-Age Romances. Its distinction is this embarrassment isn’t signposting the love as false. Ojiro’s writing shows patience in her depiction of these children. They hurt each other by accident, lash out in sudden anger, collapse in anxiety about how cruel they just were. These themes, hit with a slightly different tone, would come across as the central drama of the story, but, like children, they get up and dust their knees off to resume playing.
The childishness of their affection is both the key to the story's charm and the gentle guiding force to their growth as people. Kanba never stops being horny, but his knee jerk ogling takes on a different undertone as his love for Fujiyama builds. His inability to look away from her becomes entangled with his admiration. His understanding of Fujiyama and her own relationship with her body deepens as he clumsily tries to surprise her with gestures that show he understands her discomfort with her height and her inability to really see herself as feminine. The most direct, and perhaps affecting moment shows Kanba climbing onto the guard rail of a bridge just so she can press her face into his chest just like she did sobbing 4 volumes earlier.
Fujiyamasan wa Shishunki has dozens of similar moments created out of delicate layers of character psychology and dynamic compositions. The importance of Ojiro’s subdued style and her love of unflattering, dynamic poses is hard to overstate when it comes to explaining the success of her work. The series has significantly less access to the explicit thoughts of its characters than most manga, especially Romance manga where internal monologues are nearly as common as conversations.
This lack of direct interiority requires the reader to interpret, misinterpret, and balk at Ojiro’s expressive faces and her naturalistic body language:
When you keep both this emotional complexity and the near absence of narration in mind, the insistence on smallness, on fragility, and on the uncertainty of their future shows itself in full. Ojiro writes about a first love with a warmth that understands its inherent cuteness, but she requires the reader to grapple with the narrative under the mutual understanding that, although they are children, childhood does shrink the interior life of a person with inexperience.
When you do that, when you keep the conventions of a First-Love Romance in mind, when you understand that a First-Love Romance is inextricably linked to a Coming-Of-Age narrative, when you loose your grip on compartmentalizing disparate techniques, tropes, and traditions: I think you’ll find Fujiyamasan wa Shishunki attempting to show you a nervous, cowardly love and its enormous value.