Spoilers Below

Don’t Become an Otaku, Shinozaki-san! Well that’s it right there all in the title, isn’t it? Not really, of course. Shinozaki is a yuri-comedy manga (very much on the light end of the genre) penned by one Shou Hikawa, a fellow whose qualifications include a small mountain of Touhou doujinshi. It’s about the titular Akina Shinozaki and opens with her attending her first day of school. Not the first day, as she’s missed the entire first week due to illness. Arriving to find that most of her class has already carved itself neatly into social cliques. She has a minor panic, wondering if that by simple virtue of having missed her first week of high school if she’s been doomed to a high school career of social isolation and loneliness. She resolves to make friends with whoever she can, starting with the girl she sits next to. That person is Kaede.

Kaede is an otaku.

To Akina’s own chagrin, she also finds Kaede unbelievably cute when she smiles, and so the ball begins rolling on almost 50 chapters of what is at its core a culture clash comedy. Akina, who begins as the “normal person”, against Kaede, their third friend Micchi, and a quickly-growing support cast, who represent the otaku. Akina’s stated mission throughout much of the manga is to turn Kaede into a “normal person” so her cuteness isn’t “wasted”. This is less offputting than it might sound (and indeed if the manga can be said to have a “moral”, it’s that having different interests doesn’t mean people can’t love each other), and a couple things quickly become apparent. The first is that Akina has fallen incredibly hard for Kaede. This isn’t even remotely subtle--

--but she remains in denial until the manga’s final pages, something that’s par for the course for this sort of thing but remains a touch frustrating nonetheless. The second is that she’s also much more of a nerd than she’d like to believe.

Over the course of the manga’s opening chapters Akina slowly gets into the Prepure series (an ersatz of the very real, and very popular, Pretty Cure magical girl franchise), first to have some common talking ground with Kaede but increasingly obviously, also of her own volition. This is a pattern that the manga follows time and again, Akina doing a nerdy thing to try to get on Kaede’s good side, and then ending up enjoying that thing for its own sake, often while denying that she’s doing so. It’s a pretty simple joke--she’s basically tsundere for her own hobbies and over the manga’s run gets into everything from a Monster Hunter clone to cosplay (of a “Hong Kong Project” character, which, it will not surprise, is a play on the Touhou franchise that Hikawa made so many doujins for), and even attends an ersatz Comiket twice.

This might sound repetitive and truth be told it kind of is, but the characters have enough personality that their antics are, for the most part anyway, funny instead of frustrating, a balance that most comedy manga struggle to strike--after all you don’t want them to develop too fast, or you lose your joke material, but at the same time if you repeat the same gag too many times, it stops being funny. Akina and Kaede are helped out by a fairly large cast; consisting of Akina’s brother, the lovable but awkward Makoto who has the unfortunate luck to be the target of her frustrations when something otaku-related goes awry, several other friends both Kaede’s and some of Akina’s from middle school, and a few others to round out the gaps. Going over all of them is beyond the scope of this review, but they’re all lovable in their own way much of the time.

If Shinozaki has a real problem it’s that it kind of starts to run out of steam in its final third, where jokes start getting recycled more and the manga starts leaning more heavily on several categories of point-and-laugh gag (“ha! This person is fat! Ha! This person is a man in woman’s clothing! Ha! This person is being groped!” and so on). Thankfully, before it can truly hit a brick wall, there’s a small lovely arc about Akina, Kaede, and Micchi making a Prepure doujin, which immediately leads into the finale where Akina admits to herself, and then her friends, that she’s an otaku, and accidentally confesses to Kaede (!), who then kisses her (!!).

All in all the main descriptor for the manga is probably “cute”, with “chuckle-worthy” being a close second, and while that might not sound like a ringing endorsement, it’s honestly pretty easy to recommend. There are some gross gags (and Makoto’s friend, a lolicon, could easily have been chopped entirely) and it runs a bit longer than it needs to, but at its core, Shinozaki is a very simple girl/girl love comedy, and while it may not exactly be groundbreaking, it hits all the notes one’d expect from the genre splendidly.