Right when he's ready to give love another chance, one guy winds up swapping bodies with his cheating ex-girlfriend in this gender-bending, body-swap rom-com manga!

Sunao Akiyoshi thought he'd left heartbreak behind after swearing off love in junior high. His first love, Lemon Nishikawa, shattered his trust by admitting to cheating on him with multiple guys. Now in university, Sunao is finally ready to try again, thanks to his crush on the sweet and down-to-earth Natsumi Kogahara from his film club. But just as he's about to take a chance on love, fate throws him a curveball: he runs into Lemon again, and one fateful night under a shooting star, he wakes up in her body!

Now stuck in the ultimate awkward situation, Sunao has to navigate Lemon's life—and his growing feelings for Natsumi—while figuring out how to switch back. To make matters worse, Lemon and Natsumi are roommates, leading to hilarious misunderstandings and shocking revelations. In this gender-bending, body-swap romcom, Sunao must face his past, survive his present, and somehow come out of it all with his heart intact.

Hope You're Happy, Lemon is written and drawn by Mizuki Kashikawa. English translation by Mei Amaki. Lettered by Aila Nagamine. Published by Seven Seas (October 28, 2025). Rated 13+.

Kevin Cormack
Rating:

If I were to describe Hope You're Happy, Lemon in a single word, it would be “adorable”. It's a body swap romantic comedy starring the sweetest little trio of college students without an ounce of malice between them, and for the moment, it's refreshingly straightforward. Protagonist Sunao is a generally nice boy whose heart was broken back in middle school by his apparently unfaithful ex-girlfriend Lemon. Since then, he's avoided dating. He's currently attracted to Natsumi, an equally nice girl with whom he shares a love of movies. Just as he's anticipating their upcoming movie date, Sunao randomly bumps into Lemon, who seems oddly pleased to see him. The next day, he's surprised to wake up in Lemon's body, as she wakes up in his… Panic and hilarity ensue.

Thankfully, neither Lemon nor Sunao seems to have a vindictive bone in either body. They're equally invested in ensuring that they don't screw up their body swap partner's life. Sunao is intimidated by Lemon's intellectually demanding studies, while Lemon is so emotionally dense that she can't comprehend that Sunao and her housemate Natsumi's upcoming movie trip is really a date. “They must both really want to see this movie,” she hilariously reasons, completely missing the point.

What Sunao doesn't realize is that Lemon still holds a candle for him, and it sounds like she lied to him before about cheating on him. While this will most likely lead to complications later down the line, Lemon's quite happy to masquerade as Sunao during the date, showing Natsumi a damned good (if slightly more feminine than expected) time, including clothes shopping. Show me a straight man who enjoys clothes shopping with women, and I'll show you a liar, but Natsumi's blushing too hard to realize that this Natsuo isn't quite who he claims to be.

With ground rules established about (not) showering (eww) during body-swap days, Lemon and Sunao do their best to navigate a life where they each inhabit a different body on alternate days. There's no concrete explanation offered for why this has randomly started happening, but it honestly doesn't matter. The art is quite simplistic, giving the impression of an artist at the beginning of their career, occasionally with some awkward perspective and character postures, but the designs are super-cute. It's such a gently amusing, utterly enchanting manga that I'd happily read many more chapters of these adorable dorks panicking as they flail wildly.

Bolts
Rating:

As someone with experience being cheated on, this premise set off my fight or flight. Still, this is a rather unorthodox premise for a romantic comedy, and considering that our main characters are in college, I figured there was a chance that this book would handle things with a certain degree of maturity or nuance. Unfortunately, if you think this is going to be a story that is going to delve into potentially complex justifications for romantic partners cheating on each other, you would be wrong, because all that is set up here is to facilitate your typical misunderstanding built on a lack of communication. Throw in a random body swap storyline ala Freaky Friday, and you have something that is also plagued by missed potential.

I sympathize with our protagonist a lot because he has every reason to be as secure and neurotic as he is portrayed throughout the book. I want this guy to be able to move on to other people in his life, and it looks like he can hit it off with somebody in his college club. Being forced into a situation where you have to confront your ex regularly is incredibly frustrating, and I just want this guy to get his happy ending. The problem is that while the story does a good job of establishing our male lead's sense of anxiety and purpose, the same cannot be said for our titular character, Lemon.

It's one thing to have a character, not be aware of the implications of their own actions. However, when you tell somebody that you cheated on them with multiple people, you lose the right to interact with them casually in the same way that Lemon does with our male lead. It makes her come off as an asshole, considering how traumatic something like that can be to someone else. This puts the story in an uncomfortable position where it is constantly fighting an uphill battle to get me to empathize with her in any way. There are hints about something to be empathetic about, but the body swap storyline takes away from the interpersonal drama of our two leads, so it's just sort of forced to hang there so we can deal with typical body swap scenarios.

Was that on purpose to get readers to stick with the series for a longer time? I honestly don't know what Lemon's reason was for carrying things out the way that she did, especially when it's implied that it's partially her fault that the body swapping is happening in the first place. However, I am not sure what kind of gymnastics the story can do to justify her actions, given this specific situation. By all accounts, the male lead seems like somebody who treated her rather well, and we even get some nice stylistic flashbacks into their past relationship. I will stick with this for a little bit longer in hopes that I will get some more breadcrumbs. But if you are somebody who strictly condones cheating or has been cheated on, be careful because I'm pretty sure this is going to make you just as angry as I was.