Very! Very! Sweet 1

Strangely, this is one of the only Korean series I’ve ever read that keeps Korean honorifics intact.  In fact, they use the term “oppa,” and the last time I saw that was in a series called Sweety.  Sweety is nothing at all like Very Very Sweet, but I am tickled by the similarity in the titles.

This series is mostly about a wealthy Japanese boy named Tsuyoshi whose grandfather ships him unceremoniously to Korea to “get back to his roots.”  Apparently, one of their ancestors was originally from Korea, and Tsuyoshi’s grandfather wants him to be acquainted with the country and its culture.  The grandfather mentions that their Korean ancestor was a monk named Takuan.  I paused a minute because that’s the same name as the monk from Vagabond, but Tsuyoshi helped me out in the very next panel by asking the question himself, and supplying a portrait of Vagabond-Takuan in his thought bubble.  This is the second time in the past month or so that a manhwa made exactly the same from-left-field joke I was thinking.  It’s great, and a little creepy.  And for the record, apparently the ancestor really was the same person historically as the monk from Vagabond.

The series has kind of a weird sense of humor.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and it’s a shame that it has to be so heavily footnoted, but I wound up liking the overall “personality” behind the humor quite a bit.

The book was mostly focused on the difficulties Tsuyoshi is having in coming to Korea.  He actually didn’t speak Korean prior to coming to the country, and nobody he interacts with speaks Japanese, so he has a hard time communicating with people in general.  It’s doubly hard for him, because he’s also a huge jerk, and his tirades remain unintelligible.  To make matters worse, everyone laughs when they meet him and his… uh, companion (uncle? cousin? slightly older friend that he grew up with?), because Tsuyoshi’s grandfather chose really horrible Korean names for the two of them (Tsuyoshi’s name apparently means “pickled radish,” and I believe the companion has the Korean equivalent of the name “Melvin”).

Tsuyoshi isn’t the main character, though.  The main character is a girl named Be-Ri, Tsuyoshi’s handy next-door neighbor.  The two learn to hate each other pretty much right away (Be-Ri drools on Tsuyoshi’s pants, Tsuyoshi spits on Be-Ri), but as neighbors, they wind up running into each other, and are even coupled together at school.  I like their antagonistic relationship a lot, and I like Be-Ri’s hobbies, which seem to be scavenging throwaways and making them into things she can sell.  She’s actually a pretty cool character.  And because this is a girls’ comic, we also have potential love interest in the form of Be-Ri’s sister’s boyfriend, and Be-Ri’s sister seems to be developing a crush on Sam-Shik, the Melvin character I mentioned earlier.

This volume was mostly exposition though, so I’m looking forward to seeing what direction the series takes in volume 2.

This was a review copy provided by Yen Press.