It's telling that author Norio Sakurai uses the German loanword “karte” instead of “chapter” for every installment of her most famous manga, The Dangers in My Heart. It's used in Japan to refer to a hospital inpatient's medical chart. Second-year middle school student protagonist Kyotaro Ichikawa is the patient in question, and he's clearly not quite right in the head. A gloomy chap who suffers from a pervasive variant of “chunibyo” (literally: eighth-grade syndrome), he struggles to interact with anyone in his life, whether family members, teachers, or male or female students. He doesn't have any friends and spends his spare time leafing through morbid books with lurid titles like “Encyclopedia of Murder”. This characterisation threatens to make the first few manga “karte” more than a little off-putting, as we're given privileged access to his internal fantasies of stabbing and murdering his fellow students, especially gorgeous, statuesque part-time model Anna Yamada.

Persevere, however, and it soon becomes clear that Kyotaro's dark obsessions are merely his coping strategy for navigating the difficulties and complexities of adolescent life. He doesn't really want to hurt anyone, but struggles to make his voices and desires heard. In fact, to begin with, he's barely able to recognise the truth of his own desires – namely those towards Anna.

Anna's a full head taller than every other student in class, and her body's significantly more developed, too. Yet inside, she's as much of a child as everyone else. Socially awkward, but in a different way than Kyotaro, she's almost as unaware of personal space as the protagonist of Aharen-san is Indecipherable, plus she has a sweet tooth that rivals Death Note's L. Every day after class, Anna sneaks off to the library to devour a vast array of snacks in secret. It's there that Kyotaro, hiding from his peers behind the bookshelves, finds himself interacting with the girl he gradually realizes he has fallen in love with.

Where Kyotaro is prone to overthinking and wrongly attributing negative motivations to others, Anna is almost pathologically open and endearingly quirky. She playfully inserts herself into Kyotaro's life, never judging him for his awkwardness, sometimes sharing her sweets with him (though often merely handing him empty wrappers to dispose of). The radiantly sweet Anna and her blushing courtship with Kyotaro is the beating heart of this sometimes painfully real, yet wonderfully funny romantic comedy manga.

Each interaction with Anna gradually pulls Kyotaro out of his dark pit of self-imposed solitude, as he learns that he has value as a person and deserves to make friends with his classmates. One by one, the other students begin to notice his positive qualities, as he grows in confidence, even at one point managing to make a public speech in front of the entire school. He succeeds not only because of Anna's influence but because he taps into the potential that was always dormant within his heart. And that's where the title and the chapter naming scheme come in. We're reading through the story of a mentally unwell adolescent as he recovers, step by step, bit by bit, his vitals on the chart improving with each day that passes. Past the first volume, Kyotaro's grim fascinations have almost disappeared (though he still keeps the murder books in his room).

Structurally, each “karte” is very short, usually between eight and ten pages in length. They're usually focused on a single small interaction that may seem insignificant to anyone else, but to an overthinking introvert like Kyotaro, they may as well be matters of life and death. In the hands of a less skilled writer, this kind of character and these kinds of problems may prove exhausting to endure volume after volume, but Sakurai's deft eye for character foibles keeps things entertaining and humorous. Anna's by no means a perfect goddess figure; she has he own worries and flaws, plus she can be upset by Kyotaro's more thoughtless actions. Thankfully, she's the happy-go-lucky forgiving type, and Kyotaro always owns up to his mistakes.

The supporting cast is wonderful too, from Anna's strict yet loving mother to her toweringly intimidating yet sweetly geeky father, Kyotaro's slightly overbearing sister, and the various schoolfriends, all of whom wrestle with their own personal concerns playing out in the background. It's a manga unafraid to feature the weirder, hornier side of adolescent relationships, too. Not that it's particularly ecchi – sometimes Anna can be drawn quite suggestively, there's a fellow male student who is very vocal about his appreciation of bigger women and their body odor, and Kyotaro makes not infrequent remarks about erections and masturbation, but it's all very appropriate behavior for this particular age group. (At least as I recall my own adolescence.) Sometimes the compromising situations Kyotaro and Anna end up in can seem a little contrived, but they add to the heightened sense of adolescent anxiety, while also feeding the humor.

Sakurai's art is simple and cartoonish, at least to begin with, but this seems deliberate. Later volumes demonstrate she has an excellent command of human anatomy and posturing, at least in certain important scenes, whereas in others her art can look rushed and scrappy. So while the art can be inconsistent, it's not necessarily a problem, as the tone is often enhanced by overly simplistic googly-eyed characters without detailed features, because that makes it funnier. Regardless of how she's drawn, Anna is always super-cute. It's easy to comprehend how Kyotaro (and other characters) might fall head-over-heels in love with her.

The Dangers in My Heart is very good in manga form, though it's hard to compare it favorably to the superb animated adaptation, a shining example of how anime can elevate its source material. There's not a whole lot here in the manga that didn't make it on screen (at least as far as I can recall), and for me, the anime is the definitive version of this story. The anime's art is consistently gorgeous, as is its animation, voice acting, and soundtrack, none of which a manga can hope to compare with. The first season adapts volumes one to four, while the second season adapts volumes five to eight. I do think the manga is worth reading, though mainly as a supplement to the anime, a way to revisit beloved characters and scenes at will.

With an upcoming movie due in theaters very soon, I wonder what material will be included. Twenty-six episodes (including an OVA), or eight volumes of manga, will be very difficult to squeeze into a single, coherent film, especially as it supposedly will also feature so-far unadapted chapters from later volumes. Though, as Sakurai has announced, the manga will end this year with its fourteenth volume, there's more than enough material for another season-and-a-half. Going mainly by the strength of its animated adaptation, The Dangers in My Heart is one of my favorite ever anime romcoms. It would be a shame for it not to receive a full animated adaptation, but at least we can be assured that the rest of the story will exist in perfectly readable, entertaining form in its original manga.