The Spring 2025 Manga Guide
To Sir, Without Love: I'm Divorcing You
What's It About?
To Sir, Without Love: I'm Divorcing You has a story and art by Iroto Tsumugi, based on the novel by Kori Hisakawa. English translation by Leighann Harvey. This volume is lettered by Ken Kamura. Published by Yen Press (April 22, 2025). Rated T+.
Is It Worth Reading?
Rebecca Silverman
Rating:
I don't often say this, but this book really would have benefited from being more explicit. To Sir Without Love hinges on the relationship between its leads, Byletta and Arnald, and how they don't understand each other. They marry in absentia while Arnald's at war, and when the war ends, Byletta sends him a letter asking for a divorce, because apparently the pseudo-19th century faux Europe this is set in doesn't do annulments for unconsummated marriages. But it may as well, because Arnald comes home with the full intent of consummating it and getting Byletta pregnant, and the entire second half of the book is based on that. The art is intent on skirting around the sex as coyly as possible, and given that both of the characters are woefully underdeveloped, without something to keep reader interest, the book just lags.
It's a shame, because Byletta, at least, has at least some potential. Is she a textbook example of a “strong female character” in a light novel? Absolutely; she wants to be free to do her own thing – run a clothing shop, in this case – and is royally pissed that her father and brother arranged her marriage. But she's nothing more than competent with a yearning for self-determination. Her entire character is based on how awesome she is at turning Arnald's alcoholic father around and fixing the estate, with a brief sidenote that at school she had a reputation as a woman who would sleep around. Arnald buys into this for reasons, and so when he comes home, angry at the “please divorce me” letter, he more or less rapes her. She technically agrees, but he's very intent on using her body as he sees fit rather than securing anything like her pleasure or consent. It's off-putting, which would seem to argue against that whole “be more explicit” thing, but the sad fact of the matter is that it's boring, too. There's really no winning here.
I would be curious to read the light novel this is based on, because what could easily be happening here is that things are being condensed and curtailed as part of the adaptation. It doesn't help that the art isn't great, and that's without getting into the fact that this is a world where women wear high heels with their nightgowns, a silly detail that for some reason stuck with me. It's just kind of irritating as a story, and if you need your vaguely racy shoujo fix, you can definitely find better options elsewhere.
MrAJCosplay
Rating:
I must say, reading this felt like I was reading two different stories with the former being infinitely more interesting than the latter. In a medieval setting where it is common for women to be married off to men in established positions of power, we have one who has no desire to do anything like that. At the age of sixteen, our lead is married off to a military man who cannot leave the battlefield, and she does her best to make a life for herself. The plan is to either hope that her husband dies on the battlefield or divorce him as soon as he comes back home, as she wants to live an independent life.
We're off to a strong start here because reading this with our modern lens means I am immediately on our protagonist's side. She had no say in the matter; the reasons for getting married by her family are manipulative, and considering that she is now legally married to a man that she hasn't even seen the face of, I want to see her get out of this awful situation. We even see a lot of setup there with her confronting her husband's father and trying to manipulate circumstances in her favor. She's a very strong and crafty woman. I like that her being a naturally unfeminine woman was exactly what got her in the situation in the first place. There's a really fun setup that has a lot of potential.
Then the second half of the book happens, and we skip eight years into the future. Now the story becomes less about everything that I mentioned and more about a very strange kink fantasy. All that buildup to the potential divorce just sort of becomes negated for the sake of a new agreement that ends up becoming the basis for the story's sex scenes, which start very uncomfortable. It feels like the dynamic that our two leads now have is having an inverse effect on her character. She still has that shrewdness, and I even like that her plotting is being used against her in a way that she might not know about. However, we now have to bundle that with a blossoming romance between the two. Not only is the foundation of this romance very toxic, but it ironically makes both leads feel significantly less interesting at best or downright frustrating at worst. Honestly, I don't even want to continue reading the volume because, given the way that it ends, it just makes me feel as if the fantasy or power dynamic angle has taken over the character-driven stuff that was set up at the beginning. I could be wrong, but I've lost too much good faith to see if I am proven wrong.
Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.
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