By Izumi Miyazono. Released in Japan as “Totsuzen Desu Ga, Ashita Kekkon Shimasu” by Shogakukan, serialization ongoing in the magazine Petit Comic. Released in North America by Viz.
The ruke of thumb, be it in a shoujo comic set in school or a josei comic set in the workplace or really in any other piece of fiction ever, is that happy people are boring. Conflict is what drives a story, and anybody who insists that they know exactly what they’re going to get out of life is likely due for cruel disappointment. Of course, the goal after this is to make sure that the main characters read like real people and that you aren’t constantly slapping your forehead. We’ve seen quite a few Petit Comic titles over in North America over the last few years, and while I’ve enjoyed them to a greater or lesser degree, there has been quite a bit of forehead slapping. Everyone’s Getting Married, though, seems to be made of sterner stuff.
Our heroine, Asuka, is a highly successful businesswoman, but what she really longs to do is settle down, get married, and be a housewife. The narrative points out several times that this is because of her own home upbringing and a definite choice she wants to make, rather than anything like “women shouldn’t be working” or other tropes you’d expect to see at this point. The guy who breaks up with her at the start of the book says she’s looking for “anyone who’d put a ring on her finger”, but we see over the course of the volume that’s not true – she has standards, and most guys fail to live up to them. The trouble is, this is modern Japan, and most guys she meets aren’t looking for a wife to stay at home and keep house.
Enter our hero, Ryu. He’s a highly successful newscaster with a reputation as a playboy, but he’s actually just the sort of man that Asuka is looking for. There’s just one problem, of course – he is absolutely not looking for marriage, for both professional reasons (as a handsome face who gets female viewers, ratings would drop if he was “unavailable”) and personal reasons (a hinted bad relationship with a married woman before the book begins). However, aside from that, he’s basically exactly what Asuka is loking for. And it’s mutual, as he’s quite attracted to Asuka as well, but both of them are holding themselves back due to their insistence on marriage/no marriage respectively.
The characters in this book are what makes it. We see Asuka’s friend begin to date Ryu’s roommate in here as well, and there relationship proceeds far smoother, even though Asuka’s friend has said, much like Ryu, she’s not looking for anything permanent. But, because she’s also open to compromise and not locked into stubbornness, things can move forward in surprising ways. This is a title you read to see how the hero and heroine can compromise their principles in order to gain the happiness that’s right in front of their nose – after which, no doubt, the story will end, because the conflict is over. Definitely awaiting the next volume.