Maddies Manga

After a pep talk, Taiki is able to convince his crush to stay in Japan to pursue her sports dreams. The caveat—this means that she’ll be living at his home from now on, something that he’s desperate to hide from her other admirers.

Author

This series is written by Kouji Miura.X

Genre & Tropes

High school romance, sports.

Info about this volume

There are 19 English volumes in the series. The first was released Nov 2022.

TL;DR rating

I didn’t personally enjoy this series, however it has its charm. If you’re a fan of shounen romances, I think you will like this one!

Official synopsis:

A badminton guy falls for a basketball girl. Do these sports-crossed lovers have a chance?

Taiki Inomata loves badminton, but he has a long way to go before he can reach nationals. When Taiki sees upperclassman Chinatsu Kano practicing her heart out on the girls’ basketball team, he falls for her hard. After an unexpected turn of events brings the two closer together, sports might not be the first thing on their minds anymore!

Taiki admires Chinatsu from afar, but he doubts that she sees him in the same way. Yet somehow, he musters up the courage to tell her to never give up on her dreams! After such a bold declaration, will Taiki’s fleeting high school romance finally begin?

Sample the series!

You can pick up volume one here!

My thoughts on this volume (Spoilers!)

I think Blue Box is the series that I’ve been recommended the most by my fellow manga-lovers. I had been keeping an eye out whenever I went to the bookstore to no avail, so I ended up ordering a volume from the library. In the end, I’m glad I didn’t end up buying it.

While this volume certainly had its charm, it just didn’t speak to me. Our main character Taiki is one of Chinatsu’s many admirers. She seems to at least think of him in a positive light, but beyond that her feelings are a mystery. She’s just kind enough to him that you may think she likes him, but then she’s seen walking home with a different boy.

There’s just enough miscommunication in this volume that it got on my nerves, but it typically didn’t linger for too long. Because Taiki and Chinatsu are young, they both have difficulties with communication. The fact that they begin living together not long after they officially meet just amplifies the misunderstandings.

We see Taiki get secretly excited at the thought of living with his crush, something I personally didn’t love seeing. To be fair, this is just because I can’t relate to him—had this been a shoujo series, I likely would have given it a bit more leeway. I really loved watching him give her a pep talk at the start of the volume, and was hoping their relationship could slowly grow from there. Now that they’re living together, I’m afraid things will be pushed to move faster than either of them can handle.

Taiki is so in his head about Chinatsu that he is constantly putting her on a pedestal, and you can’t really be in a meaningful relationship with someone you overly idolize. This leads to him doing things that he probably wouldn’t have had he taken a second to think, causing Chinatsu to suffer. I just really can’t relate to Taiki as a character. While I certainly don’t think of him negatively—I admire his relationship with his friends, for example—I just struggle to sympathize with him.