A brand new rom-com will be making its English debut tomorrow: I Belong to the Baddest Girl at School. Known as Pashiri na Boku to Koi-suru Banchou-san in Japan, One Peace Books is releasing Ui Kashima’s manga series, and they recently provided the opportunity to talk about the localization of it with translator Emily Balistrieri and editor Eric Margolis over email. Below they each answer questions revolving around the two main characters, Unoki and Toramaru, and the general nature of this romantic comedy work.
TheOASG: How would you summarize I Belong to the Baddest Girl at School?
Emily Balistrieri: It’s a high-school rom-com where Unoki, who has always been bullied, gets asked out by Toramaru, the titular baddest girl at school, except he thinks she wants to have him as her gopher and general servant. The result is that he’s always kind of terrified of her, but she’s always having romantic thoughts, and the reader is basically screaming at them to communicate properly the whole time.
Eric Margolis: The shy bullied kid is dating the bancho, the ruthless queen of the delinquents, and he doesn’t even know it. I like to call it a ‘rom-com of misunderstandings.’
How long did it take to work on the first volume?
Emily: I don’t remember! Haha. It was a while ago. But One Peace Books has an editing process that includes the translator, so in that sense, more than a typical volume of manga elsewhere, I would say!
Eric: The process for me is split up over a long period of time, because I read the series first a long, long time ago. The edits themselves don’t take too long, however, since Emily’s translations are so excellent.
What were some of the challenges of working on Baddest Girl at School?
Emily: Lots of the humor relies on misunderstandings so as you can imagine there are some choice puns. The bento-planning scene in particular took some doing.
Eric: I agree with Emily on the puns—this series has some brutal ones that required real creativity on his part. Adding on to that, the cultural references proved challenging. Part of the humor of the series is that a lot of Toramaru’s actions and appearance resemble that of a classic high school bancho gang leader, and a lot of them are even yakuza references.
However, I think most hardcore manga fans will get these references and find them both humorous and satisfying. Meanwhile, we try to give gentle pokes in the English version to help get readers that are less familiar with Japanese culture up to speed.
What turned out to be the biggest surprise in working on this series so far?
Emily: Hmm, I guess this is a bit of a kitty-corner answer, and not so much a surprise as much as just a change of pace, but…all the other manga I’ve translated for print so far have been based on or spun-off of light novels, and isekai stories at that, so it’s been really refreshing to do something completely different.
Eric: How adorable Toramaru is. Sometimes she’s completely terrifying, but a lot of the time she’s an incredibly charming character. I think that readers will fall in love with the baddest girl at school faster than they expect.
What should readers keep in mind as they consider checking out this manga?
Emily: Hmm, for whatever reason this question only brings content warnings to mind, which makes me nervous because I don’t want to miss something. But I think for this first volume, if you can handle some schoolyard violence and don’t have trauma around being ordered around by someone who could beat you up, you’ll be okay.
For me the harder part is the pain of the rom-com: wanting them to just communicate properly but realizing there would be no story if they did that.
Eric: Be ready to laugh…but also to feel something. Obviously, the situations in the story are exaggerated versions of the ones we face in high school in real life. But the story did really remind me about the awkwardness of high school romance and of just being that age where you have to navigate a complex social world, growing up, and having feelings for someone. These are characters, not caricatures, and I think they’re as genuine as they are funny.