By Masami Tsuda. Released in Japan by Hakusensha, serialized in the magazine LaLa. Released in North America by Tokyopop.

It’s always rather refreshing to see these short, 1-2 volume series, as many of the frustrations you see in shoujo are not present simply as the series is so small. No agonizing about love confessions for volumes at a time, no 3rd party rivals, no hideous misunderstandings… just two people realizing that “Oh, that’s what this feeling is, it’s love”.

Hazuki is the one to realize this, as he reads a famous poem that also describes the way he’s currently feeling about Nanoha. Naturally, he starts blushing and stuttering, and basically becoming a wreck around Nanoha. But when called on it by her “monster”, he pretty much comes right out and says he loves her. And from that point on, he ends up trying to be understanding and sweet, not pressing her on the issue and waiting for her to deal with her own feelings.

At first Nanoha is just as freaked out as he was, but when he says he doesn’t mind keeping their relationship as it had been for now, she is fairly relieved. Sadly for him, this means she goes back to acting normally, which not only means not responding to his overture of love, but also that she is unthinkingly adorable and cute, sending him into a frenzy. He calls this her ‘little devil’, which makes an amusing counterpart to her own anthropomorphic ‘monster’, though it doesn’t have an adorable SD-figure of it.

Speaking of the monster, things really begin to turn bad once Nanoha starts thinking about why Hazuki has fallen in love with her, and realizes that she’s a plain, ordinary girl. (Being surrounded by her two pretty and poised friends hasn’t helped much, though they both do their best to not have it be an issue.) After much hemming and hawing, she asks him what he ses in her, and he praises her forthright, honest nature, her ability to tell people exactly what she thinks of them… which HORRIFIES her, as she’s always equated that part of herself with the ‘monster’, and now thinks that Hazuki doesn’t love her, but it! (The shot of Nanoha realizing this is easily the funniest part of the book, by the way.)

After a talk with her friends, who reveal that they have their own ‘monsters’ inside them as well, Nanoha eventually works things out with Hazuki, and they end up as a couple. And then… well, then the story ends, as the main issue has been resolved, and this isn’t an epic. This does make the final chapter a bit of an anticlimax, as it reads as just a chapter of the two of them being really happy together. Still, they’re cute, and it does have a few funny bits where they note Nanoha is hitting a growth spurt.

Tsuda designed the series from the start to be 12 chapters long, one for each month of the year, and have it come out in 12 straight issues of LaLa magazine. As such, it’s compact as I’ve noted, but that’s also its strength as well. (Less of a strength is the ‘month’ thing… I never really got a sense that a year was passing, or each chapter was 1 month later. It felt more like it happened over a few weeks.) In the end, it’s a cute, fun romance that does what Tsuda does best: highlight the thought processes of a boy and a girl, and how they may be very different things but end up working towards the same goal. And really, the couple is just so cute together.

By Masami Tsuda. Released in Japan by Hakusensha, serialized in the magazine LaLa. Released in North America by Tokyopop.

After the success of Kare Kano (well, success in a broad sense – I know many people who read the ending and now disown the series and everything to do with it), Tokyopop picked up a few other titles by Masami Tsuda that were a) short, and b) easy to translate. (B is likely why we aren’t seeing her newest series, Chotto Edo Made, a romantic school comedy set in the Edo period, which scanlators dropped after one chapter due to the vocabulary.) The first was a short story collection bundling a few of her Japanese one-shots, and this is the second, a two-volume series she did for LaLa in 2007.

I quite enjoyed it, and it’s good at showing off the technique that Tsuda has learned by working on the long-running Kare Kano. The premise has Nanoha, a normal girl who happens to hang out with two childhood friends who are the queens of the school. She’s sweet, likeable, has trouble with classes, and is noted to be unmemorable. She also possesses a “little monster” inside of her, one that comes out whenever she meets the smooth, suave Hazuki, who is a handsome guy who wraps all the other girls around his finger. He drives her nuts, and when this grabs his attention and he calls her on it, she completely opens up and tears his “petty, superficial” self to shreds.

There’s lots of things to like here. Hazuki is indeed a pretty-boy phoney, but it’s not a deliberate mask. He was spoiled by his parents, and praised for his looks and natural intelligence, so it’s never occurred to him to look further. One he does, and finds that he hates what he sees, he makes an honest effort to change, even if this means blocking himself off from the girls who want to be around a hot guy. (The girls tell him point blank they know he’s not boyfriend material, he’s just there to be seen with.) Naturally, when he thinks of HOW he can change, he turns to Nanoha.

Sadly, Nanoha’s not the sort who will cheerfully counsel him. He still grates on her nerves, and now that it’s no longer because he’s a vain stooge, she can’t figure it out. What’s worse, she thinks about how she went off on him, and now he’s a loner with few friends, and realizes that her ‘little monster’ is bullying him. So now she’s simply nervous and twitchy, trying to control herself and avoid him as much as possible. Too bad he’s now sitting next to her in class…

One of my favorite parts of the manga is in Chapter 5, where we get POV shots of the two characters on opposite pages. First we see Nanoha sitting at her desk, watching Hazuki be calm and self-possessed and sneaking glances at her, while she sweats, freaks, and tries to do her notes. On the opposite page, we see Hazuki, watching Nanoha constantly, and seeing her looking diligent and serious – without all the super-deformed freaking out we saw in her own POV. It’s great to see this sort of layout in a shoujo manga, especially a story like this that depends on understanding another point of view. The art helps to teach the story.

Another thing I enjoyed was the suggestion that the other, supporting characters are having lives and adventures of their own just off the page. This can be a drawback sometimes, of course – you risk the reader wanting to read about them more than your heroes – but it’s fun here. We see her friend Renge, who reminds me a great deal of Hanajima from Fruits Basket (not all that uncommon – many shoujo series have a cute normal heroine, a tall lanky blonde female friend and a silent, serious female friend) and her strange family that still call each other by baby names. There’s Hazuki’s sister, who is just as pretty as he is but forces her brother to do her hair and makeup so that she can achieve that – which may seem petty, but given he was a spoiled brat, actually seems to be more like an object lesson in humility. And then there’s Ryuzaki, the “Lady Oscar” of the school, who’s blonde, elegant, gorgeous… and dirt poor, as she notes herself. She maintains a garden solely because they need vegetables to eat, and her equally gorgeous brother works at a broken-down construction site. Kare Kano showed us how much fun Tsuda has with her side character’s backgrounds and lives, and we see that even in a much shorter series such as this.

Eensy Weensy Monster only has two volumes, so no doubt Nanoha will get over her issues soon and fall for Hazuki – it is a shoujo romance, after all. But the quirky characters and the mature art design help to sell me the story, even more than the name recognition of the artist who did Kare Kano.