The Fall 2020 Manga Guide

Strawberry Fields Once Again

What's It About? 

“I'll never have a 3D romance.” High schooler Akira loves otome games and refuses to have a 3D romance, so she's caught off-guard when the new transfer student suddenly declares that she is Akira's future lover. It's the start of the bittersweet story of two girls who are more than friends but less than lovers.

Strawberry Fields Once Again is drawn and scripted by Kazura Kinosaki. Yen Press will release both digital and print versions of the first volume on December 15 for $13.00 and $6.99 respectively.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Either there's something darker lurking beneath the surface of Kazura Kinosaki's Strawberry Fields Once Again or I'm seeing things. If my suspicion is true, this is following the Higurashi: When They Cry method of lulling readers into a false sense of security with cutesy rom-com hijinks before the true nature of the story is revealed. Not that this is in any other way comparable to that horror/mystery series; if anything bad happens in the future that Pure comes from, I'd say that it's more likely to be on the personal tragedy front than anything more twisted. But it does give the volume an interesting edge that makes me want to re-read earlier chapters and see if there are any clues as to what might really be going on.

The premise we're presented with is very simple: Akira is a high school girl who loves otome games but has vowed never to have a 3D romance, because in her experience, real-life love stories only end in tragedy. Then one day an enthusiastic buxom girl named Pure of all things shows up, throws herself at Akira, and proclaims that she's come from the future where the two of them are engaged and preparing for their overseas wedding. She says that she's returned to the past to fulfill a wish future Akira once voiced to her, that she wished they'd been together in high school. Pure's just dippy enough that it sounds reasonably like something she'd do (time travel aside), and thus she commences upending Akira's life in her attempts to jump-start their romance.

Until the other shoe starts to hover (it doesn't truly drop), this is actually kind of annoying. Pure is way too perky for her own good and her pursuit of Akira is so single-minded as to be irritating. But when we start to see what's really going on in Akira's life – dead mother, absent father, shut-in brother – and how Pure reacts to these things, it starts to look an awful lot like Pure's reasons for coming back to the past are more complicated than she's said. Her heartbreak when Akira calls her a friend (instead of a lover) is one thing, but she seems to know a lot more than she's letting on about brother Ruri, and her comment about not changing things sounds as if she wishes she could. There are more and more places in the later chapters that imply that Pure came back for herself as much as Akira, and the reason behind that becomes the question that drives interest in reading the next volume.

Strawberry Fields Once Again's first book is an odd mix of mildly alarming and kind of annoying. It doesn't always balance things well, and the four-panel spin-off about a yuri-obsessed classmate seems to indicate that Kinosaki may be more used to writing humor. But this is intriguing, and definitely worth a second volume to see where it ends up.

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Caitlin Moore

Rating:

You can tell a lot about time travel romance based on how many years the time travel is. If it's decades or centuries, to the extent that it's practically isekai, chances are there will be lots of adventure and a happy ending – or at least everyone will make it out. A difference of just a few years? You're going to cry.

Strawberry Fields Once Again involves a seven-year difference, so I have the sneaking suspicion it's going to tear out my heart. This is a compliment, mind you – it means I enjoyed the first part enough to feel like it has that kind of emotional power over me.

When the main character, Akira, announced that she would never have a 3D romance while playing an otome game on the Switch, I thought I knew where it was going. I figured she, like so many of my friends who eventually came out, was only interested in anime boys and repulsed by real ones, and would eventually discover that what she really liked was 3D girls. When Pure tripped and showed her underwear, I figured it would be a gaze-y, fanservice-riddled mess.

But no. I've rarely been so happy to be wrong, because Strawberry Fields Once Again has a level of emotional depth that surprised me. Akira's family life is a disaster – a cascading series of heartwrenching tragedies that are all too plausible, and informs her distaste for real-life relationships. Pure is clingy and pushes at Akira's boundaries to an extent I don't care for, but her love seems sincere and I can understand where she's coming from, since the shift from “committed partners” to “total strangers” would be abrupt to anyone.

One of my favorite things about doing preview guides is finding gems of series I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. Sure, I have to consume a lot of stuff that doesn't interest me, and some stuff I actively hate, but if I get to enjoy sweet treats like this? Totally worth it.