Cactus’s Secret 4

Nana Haruta – Viz – 2010 – 4 volumes

I was debating picking up the first three volumes of this, because I knew I’d love it.  But I’ve been putting off reading this forever (I probably got it when it came out five years ago), and I wanted a cute shoujo manga today.  This fit the bill perfectly.

It’s not too hard to jump into these, even at the end.  This one was even more real-life than usual.  Miku’s a quick-tempered high school senior, a good student.  Kyohei is her boyfriend, laid-back, and formerly a troublemaker.  Not such a good student.  Only the first half of this volume was their story, and it was about a miscommunication about what would happen once they graduated.  Kyohei didn’t know what he wanted to do post-high school, and Miku was getting pressured to attend school outside the prefecture, far away from Kyohei and her family.  There’s also a cute new nurse that Miku gets jealous over.

It was cute stuff, and exactly what I wanted out of it.  Plus, the second half was another cute shoujo one-shot (this one about a childhood friend becoming a boyfriend), and with the long one-shot, the book read like two very cute shoujo short stories.  Great!

There’s also some very brief shorts involving Cactus’s Secret characters.  One was about Kyohei’s brother, who I’m tempted to go back for.  Honestly, I’m more inclined to pick up the beginning of the series now that I’ve read the end, because it’s very much my flavor of cute shoujo romance.

I didn’t read the author side-bars throughout, and there were quite a few.  I did read the afterward, though, which was depressing.  She said she did a pencil sketch because she ran out of time, then proceeded to apologize to her editor again and again, for, among other things, getting a part-time job while she was drawing Cactus’s Secret and not telling her about it (probably because the time commitment was strictly forbidden).  Presumably, because she wasn’t making enough money drawing manga.  She was also 19.  Hopefully, she’s gone on to be a successful mangaka and doesn’t have to worry about that anymore.  Her new series sounds cute as well.