A Thousand Miles

My Monster Secret

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My Monster Secret (also known as “Jitsu wa Watashi wa” or “Actually, I Am..”) is a 2013 Romantic Comedy Manga by Eiji Masuda. It was serialized in Akita Shoten Publishing’s Weekly Shonen Champion Magazine between January 2013 and February 2017, totally 22 volumes. A 13 episode anime was broadcast in spring 2015 with Seven Seas Entertainment licensing the series for a western release in 2016.

Cover Appeal

Eiji Masuda – Taking a gander at Eiji Masuda’s works reveals a handful of works centering around young folks with challenging pasts (or presents) trying their best to turn things around in their favor. As is the case in most of his works, this is paired with comedy and supernatural elements. The odd one out seems to be Shuukan Shounen Hachi which, as it’s namesake implies, is a bit of a more straightforward Shounen manga. Either way, slapstick comedy and exaggeration seems to be the name of the game here.

Well Known Secret – The front cover prominently features one of our main characters: Shiragami Youko. With her green hair and her little wings, she kinda looks like Morrigan Aensland….and is that a moon and bats in the background? I’m going to overlook the back cover and it’s Asahi level of transparency with it’s blurb. They just give the secret away – She’s a vampire. But I guess that’s on brand for this property. It’s ingenious, really….

The Gist

Kuromine Asahi is an open book. Like the worst of the worst as far as poker faces go. He gets the bright idea to act on his feelings for his classmate, Youko Shiragami, and confess to her before anyone (else) catches on. Only, he instead finds out that she’s a vampire and that anyone knowing is grounds for her removal from school. Great, a girl with a life changing secret and a boy that can’t seem to keep one. But what’s a boy gonna do? Try his best, that’s what – and that’s just what Asahi is going to have to do if he doesn’t want the girl he loves to disappear .

The Cast

Kuromine Asahi – Easily flustered protagonist and can’t keep a secret. So much so, he’s known as the “Holey Sieve” – much to his chagrin. Trying his best to protect Youko’s

Shiragami Youko – Asahi’s classmate. Polite and reserved, she spends most of her time alone. Apparently, she arrives before everyone and leaves well after they’ve all gone home. Makes sense considering she’s a vampire and doesn’t like the sun.

Akemi Mikan – A (questionable) childhood “friend” of Asahi’s. She runs the school’s newspaper (essentially a gossip column at this point) and regularly harasses Asahi for info to publish. She’s known as the “Queen of Pure Evil” because she really has no motivation for doing this besides literally enjoying the suffering of others. As such, she’s Asahi’s biggest enemy right now.

Aizawa Nagisa – Class Representative. Curt and strict, she keeps teachers and students alike in line. She has shot our protaggonist down in the past, mistakenly thinking he liked her. As the opening narration points out, everyone has a secret, and our class rep has one of her own.

The Rub

This being the first work from Eiji Masuda I’m reading, I didn’t really know what to expect. But this mix of comedy, supernatural and romance is really working for me, largely because of their prominence, in that order. The fun of the volume is the humor. Usually at Asahi’s expense, it’s rightfully the bread and butter of the story. I’m not sure how long they can keep this up, but the misunderstandings and near misses that comprise the bulk of it haven’t run thin yet.

Romance is a hard thing to do, but if you push too fast, it comes across as disingenuous – and poof, you ruined it. This aspect of the story is telegraphed (Asahi likes Youko and says as much), but they don’t take it any further than it really needs to be taken right now – The two have just become friends a third of the way through the volume and that’s as far as they go.

So no one’s getting all lovey-dovey (yet). Awesome, it’s too early. However, it’s never too early for characters to show their……uh, character. For them to prove to the audience that they’re a person worth rooting for.

Asahi finds out Youko’s secret as he gets ready to confess his love for her. She’s happy that he isn’t weirded out or angry, but just shrugs and points out she’ll have to leave school. What’s Asahi do? Immediately points out that that’s awful, suggests keeping the fact that he knows her secret a secret and asks if she’d be his friend. This is probably going to sound stupid to a lot of you, but this one moment sticks out to me.

Or rather, this and what immediately follows. Asahi realizes he said “friend” and not “girlfriend” and kinda freaks out, but mulls it over as the two walk home and settles on the conclusion that he did (READ: said) the right thing. It would be all too easy to just write this off as another one of those comedic hang ups centering around Asahi’s shortcomings (he even lampshades this: “I’m not just making excuses”) and it kinda is, but the conclusion he came to is what caught my attention.

Essentially, Asahi realizes that knowing her secret gives him some power over her circumstances and that it would be gross to ask her out at a time like this because she might feel pressured to agree. Instead he decides to work at keeping the secret for her benefit. It ain’t missionary work, but it’s good judgement on his part and this, combined with Youko’s insistence that he doesn’t run himself ragged trying to keep her vampirism under wraps, shows me that these two are decent people that care about each other in their own way.

Boom, now I’m invested and can root for them. Romance to your heart’s content…

In Conclusion

I didn’t say anything about it before, but Eiji’s artstyle here feels…familiar, comfortable. This is likely just me subconsciously recognizing certain structural traits from other styles. There’s definitely some degree of exaggeration, but it’s relegated mostly to the facial features (wide mouthy grins and bigger eyes) rather than the bodies. This is all good and well as the comedic hijinks tend to push the characters through the expression gamut

Rom coms (supernatural or not) aren’t exactly my thing, so I’m not sure when I’ll be back around to My Monster Secret, but I can definitely say I was pleasantly surprised with it and had a good time.

Continue?: Sure, why not?