What's It About?

Tasuku is in love with his “cool and mysterious” neighbor, Shia. She's three years older than him, a big film buff, and doesn't like him back. The two get together to watch movies every Wednesday, but no matter how many times Tasuku attempts to use these meetups to profess his love for her, Shia sends him right back into the friend zone.

Can Tasuku prove himself a mature and capable boyfriend? And what secrets is Shia hiding behind her smiley demeanor?

I’m in Love with the Older Girl Next Door has story and art by Koume Fujichika. English translation by Rowena Chen and Alan Cheng and lettering by Carolina Hernández Mendoza. Published by Seven Seas (March 18, 2025).

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Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris
Rating:

Taken on its face, I’m in Love with the Older Girl Next Door can be equal parts boring and frustrating to follow. It's an alleged romantic comedy centered on 13-year-old Tasuku's crush on his neighbor, Shia, who is three years his senior. Unfortunately, Tasuku, like all 13-year-old boys, is an idiot, and he particularly lacks the emotional intelligence to take any initiative with Shia, apart from watching movies he doesn't understand with her while pining. He makes some blunt declarations that she understandably bounces off, and the story quickly turns into something that will likely be agony for anyone susceptible to secondhand embarrassment or who has vivid memories of awkward early teen experiences.

However, understanding that experience means I can give Older Girl Next Door something of the benefit of the doubt if it is indeed riding the recollection of that experience intentionally. For as much as Tasuku is an idiot who sucks, the story seems to be reasonably aware that he's an idiot who sucks, with Shia and others in his life seemingly trying to get him to exercise a bit more self-awareness. This manga works better when viewed less as an actual romantic comedy and more as a coming-of-age story, where Tasuku's feelings for Shia are simply a vector for him to become more aware of himself and the world. These are lessons everybody has to learn eventually, after all, and every now and then, there's a twinge of growth that feels lived.

That's something, but it's few and far between, with the rest of Older Girl Next Door otherwise floundering about in the boring and frustrating shallow end. At times it might almost come off like the author working out some very specific personal hang-ups from their youth experiences. It doesn't help that Tasuku doesn't come off like an authentically typical 13-year-old boy a lot of the time. He speaks in verbose formalities, but by his admission can barely understand movies more complex than a Ghibli animation. And his limited understanding of things affects the story that the audience views through him. So, if there's something deeper going on with Shia that the story will explore, the plot has barely alluded to it yet. This means that all of Tasuku's talk of her being "mysterious" for being a normal teenage girl dealing with normal teenage girl things makes him even more hopeless. I want to give this story more of a chance and its attempt at capturing understated, everyday formative childhood experiences. But Tasuku's just too thick a toolbox of a protagonist to make this exercise as compellingly sympathetic as it could be.

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