Kono Koi ni Mirai wa nai

Disclaimer: might include spoilers, though there is not much to spoil in the first place

The story revolves around Yuji who deals with unrequited love as well as her internalised shame of being a trans woman (which is why I will be referring to her as she/her) and other characters who struggle with their own issues, and no, I do not remember any of the other characters names.

That being said, let’s get into it.

The guy Yuji has a crush on is kind of the chick magnet of the university who managed to make every girl that looked him for more than 2 seconds fall for him. How is this a problem you might ask? Well it’s not. His problem is that he wants to become a successful writer.

Then there’s the rich girl who has a crush on mentioned guy, she sleeps with him and even elopes with him because her parents forced an arranged marriage on her. And on top of that, she has self worth issues and thinks she is less desirable because she is infertile.

The other girl from the club is teased by chick magnet guy for “looking like a guy”so she dresses up and presents herself more feminine in hopes to get his attention.

Yuji eventually comes across a guy who is gay, who first acted predatory for no reason, and then explained that he thought Yuji was gay as well (doesn’t excuse his behaviour though). This is where Yuji kind of explains that she wants to be a woman, but of course not with the actual term of transgender.

Needless to say the gay guy sets up a meeting with a trans bartender and Yuji for the first time in her life meets a fellow trans woman. She works a shift at the bar and of course during that very shift her crush enters the bar. When he recognise her as Yuji from university, she finally confesses. The guy rejects her, as she had expected, but Yuji is glad that she got rejected in a way that affirmed her gender, and she is relieved that she finally got that off her chest.

In the epilogue we see Yuji still presenting as masc when in university, with longer hair now. And as she and her crush hang out, she realises once again that her feelings are still there, but this time not with the anxiety of getting rejected for being trans.

The way Yuji is shown to feel incredibly alone and worried that something feels wrong with her and a strong dislike for her body - and more importantly - how happy she felt when wearing clothes she liked, felt realistic.
When the story focused on how the other members deal with their own problems, i felt like the manga tried to level all of the other problems with Yujis internal struggle of gender identity. And objectively, I’d argue that the other problems would be easier to solve than actual gender dysphoria.

Overall, this was an okay manga and just in the range of my expectations. The character development is minimal and I didn’t expect Yuji to be fully out after the time skip so it felt realistic to me.

Art wise I don’t have any complaints. It was easy to follow and the style is pretty.

Overall I’d rate this a 5/10. While it depicts the trans experience of our main character Yuji, I wish we would have seen more of her amongst all the other characters problems and drama.