Major spoilers follow throughout this review!
This was a letdown from the first volume. In this book, university entrance exams are coming up and initially Sokoki and Majima get dinner together after cram school every day, so their friendship continues. However, the assumptions that they keep making about how the other person feels, especially combined with Sonoki’s nervousness around Majima and his decision to pull back from their friendship, means that they spend a lot of time here talking to other people about what’s happening in their friendship and a lot of time thinking about the other guy, but not talking to each other. They also get sorted into different classes, so that makes everything worse.
I kept waiting for them to get together, but this volume is just rife with miscommunication and unspoken issues on both sides. We do get to learn about Majima’s past, which was affecting and I thought was a good counter to his constantly cheery exterior. But I found the ending to be abrupt and frustrating, and miscommunication is one of my least favorite tropes. Sonoki didn’t seem to do much growth, whereas I just felt bad for Majima the whole time, who couldn’t understand why Sonoki was seemingly mad at him. The whole thing getting wrapped up in a short time jump epilogue felt kind of like a slap in the face. I don’t even get to see them hash all this out and talk? I did think the epilogue was cute and I’m glad it was at least there, but after two volumes I didn’t get why we couldn’t have some more space to see how they were as adults, because from the brief glimpse I got, it was very cute. The art is still great in this volume and I like the side characters, but I don’t know if I’d recommend the whole series based off the ending.
