Meca Tanaka is no stranger to shoujo manga – she debuted in 1998 and has been consistently creating manga ever since. Teppeki Honeymoon is the latest of her works to be translated into English; Viz released both Meteor Prince and The Young Master's Revenge, Tokyopop translated Pearl Pink back during the publisher's first incarnation, and now defunct manga publisher CMX released Omukae desu.. At the same time, other titles such as Faster than a Kiss are available in German, French, and Indonesian translations. All of this goes to say that Tanaka has the experience to create highly enjoyable shoujo stories, which makes me wonder where things went slightly wrong with Teppeki Honeymoon.

Grim as that sentence sounds, this isn't a bad book by any means. It has many of the elements that make for a fun shoujo romance: heroine Ena is a hard-working, downtrodden young woman doing her absolute best when she accidentally finds herself engaged to twenty-five-year-old Sakae, heir to a security company. Sakae's family is utterly obsessed with physical strength as a marker of worth, and they've set up a “Cinderella Excalibur” test to find him their ideal bride. Ena has no intention of participating; in fact, she's just trying to be helpful when she notices two women trying to pick something up. But her actions lead to her pulling the sword from the stone, and the next thing she knows, she's hustled to the Kugo family home as Sakae's fiancée. She in no way wants to go through with this (and Sakae's not keen on it either). Still, when she realizes that they'll get her family out of debt, she changes her mind…and the deal gets even better when, behind their backs, Sakae renegotiates the deal to be a fake engagement for three months.

This is where the title comes in. Although One Peace Books didn't deign to translate “teppeki” (鉄壁), it can mean “ironclad defense,” which is what this engagement is for both Ena and Sakae. For her, it's a defense against her family's struggles with poverty, while for him, it's a defense against his family in general. Although Sakae hides behind an affable smile, the last chapters in the volume show that there's no love lost between Sakae and the rest of the Kugos. In part, this seems to stem from his father refusing to follow the family system and marrying an insufficiently strong woman, which they use as the ultimate blade to hold over Sakae's head. He's meant to come back into the family fold, but it's clear that his treatment at their hands is making him want to do the opposite.

Sakae and Ena's relationship walks a very fine line in this book. He's well aware that she's still in high school and he doesn't want to pressure her. But he also plainly finds her personality attractive: she's earnest and hardworking and caring, and that last is something he doesn't seem to have experienced much of. He does enjoy teasing her in ways that border on inappropriate; his family demands “lovey dovey” pictures of the two of them every day, and he's only too happy to plop a fiercely blushing Ena onto his lap or snuggle her close when she's uncomfortable. That's not great, even if it is within genre norms, and it robs Ena of some of her agency. Yes, she signed up for this, but she's still allowed to say no to things that make her uncomfortable.

That's the major issue in this volume: Ena's discomfort throughout her interactions with Sakae. She likes him, but she's also aware that he's an adult to her teenager, and she has never been particularly interested in dating, much less marriage. Her world is expanding at an alarming rate, and she spends most of the book trying to adapt to that. That she cares about Sakae becomes apparent in a very organic way, and that contrasts entertainingly with the way she sometimes treats him like one of her younger brothers, hiding vegetables in his meat and trying to figure out how to get him to eat more food. The framework is there for this to broaden into a much better romance as the story goes on; it just feels a bit too much like a frame rather than a story at this point.

The lack of title translation aside (One Peace doesn't include the sort of cultural notes Kodansha, Yen Press, and Viz do), this reads very smoothly, and Tanaka's skill with panel flow shows how experienced she is as a creator. The art can feel a little bare-bones at times, but there's always a sense of place and emotion, which makes up for any sins. Tanaka notes that this is her first work for the digital magazine Hana Yume Ai (she previously was published in LaLa), and that meant she had to change the way she creates manga, but honestly, if she hadn't said anything, you wouldn't know.

Teppeki Honeymoon isn't off to a particularly strong start. It didn't grab me in the same way Tanaka's other English-released series did. Still, there's enough skill at play in the manga itself that I'm willing to give it another volume or two. The frame is there; now it just needs to be filled in.