Review: You and I Are Polar Opposites Vol. 1

They say opposites attract, and that would certainly seem to be the case with Suzuki and Tani who, despite being classmates, could not be more different from one another. 

The pink-haired Suzuki is loud, outgoing and popular, always at the center of a whirl of conversations and social activities. The bespectacled Tani is quiet, stoic and gracelessly direct on the occasions when he does speak to a classmate. (At one point, a classmate contemplating the pair imagines a sort of pyramid chart showing the various levels of popularity within the school hierarchy, and Tani is not even in the chart, but standing off to the side of it and labeled "Out of bounds".)

Nevertheless, Suzuki has a crush on Tani, partially because she thinks he's cute, and partially because she's attracted to the fact that he is always so true to himself and that he doesn't go out of his way to try to please others like she herself does. 

At school, her interest mostly manifests in her trying to include him in the conversation, even when it is something he clearly has no interest in (Like, for example, the best kind of eye makeup). 

Now, I am used to manga romances going on for hundreds and hundreds of pages before any form of consummation, with the characters dithering and fretting for multiple volumes before one or the other comes out and confesses their feelings. 

It was therefore a little surprising that by page 13, the pair are holding hands on a walk home and by page 33 Suzuki has chased Tani down and screamed "I like you!!!" at him. By the time that the first chapter ends, then, the pair are a couple already.

The premise of this particular high school romantic comedy isn't the usual will they/won't they then, but rather if and how two such incredibly different people can make a relationship work.

Throughout the rest of the first volume they walk home again together as a couple, they go on their first date (burgers, shopping and a movie), Suzuki's friends try to make sense of the relationship and the pair work on communicating their feelings for one another more effectively. 

It's all quite fun and cute, if I can use that word (There's a chapter entitled "Cute", in which Tani struggles to figure out exactly what Suzuki means when she uses the word, as she uses it quite often and in a variety of contexts).

The opposite nature of the characters reflected in manga-ka Kocha Agasawa's portrayals of them as well, as any drama involving Tani mostly plays out in narration boxes in his own head, while Suzuki abstracts into cartoonier renderings when her emotions are high, the Usagi-like buns/"meatballs" of her hair sometimes pop off her head when she's surprised and, in one memorable scenes, she glows and sparkles with unstoppable-ity—like Mario after he picks up the star—after a successful first date. 

The manga seems to have run eight volumes, the last of which was released earlier this year, and there's an anime adaptation as well.