How close are you to your friends? Well, the three girls and two guys of the Cultural Research Club are about to get really close…as in “we’re in each other’s heads” close. Or rather, in each other’s bodies.
Kokoro Connect is a rather unique take on the body-swapping genre. Instead of two people switching, the five members of the club jump between the other four for as little as a minute all the way up to a few hours. So they’re lucky to not only not have the threat of these swaps being permanent but also discover the culprit: a mysterious being known as Heartseed.
The protagonist of the story is Taichi, an overly nice guy and wrestling fanatic. The rest of the club members include the energetic president Nagase; the strict, scary, and smart Inaba; buttmonkey Aoki; and tough-as-nails but lover of cute things Kiriyama. They’re an eclectic group of friends who, just like everyone, has things they don’t want exposed, making them perfect targets for Heartseed.
Of course, there’s the usual body-swapping antics and risque content. Although as for the latter, there’s a decent amount of gender-bending aspects and risque content. But since these swaps are rather short, the characters don’t have a lot of time to get caught in compromising situations. In fact, a lot of swaps happen off-screen, so this isn’t a gut-busting comedy or even full of bad cover-up stories. Much of the novel is just Inaba’s aggressiveness and/or pragmatism behavior going off on whatever target is making her mad, from Taichi to Heartseed.
Which leads into the main problem of the novel: it’s too short. It feels too fast-moving once the switches are established. I imagine the author stuck with Taichi’s point-of-view as to not reveal everyone’s secrets beforehand, but that comes with two downsides. First, this means everyone must expose their hearts to him rather than showing their private struggles during the swap. Second, it feels like it just moves on from solving (or at least exposing) one person’s problem before moving on to another. Plus, the five friends (particularly Inaba) talk a lot of smack, so when you take out jokes about Taichi’s wrestling obsession or Aoki’s flirtatiousness, Kokoro Connect feels even shorter.
I did like how the characters, overall, have good self-inflection. Even though they know they have some emotional baggage or personal issues, it’s often easier to just ignore them or work around them rather than deal with them. And it’s easy to see someone every day and yet not see them, a fact that ends up smacking characters right in the face. And as Taichi and the others face a horrible decision at the end of the story, we see both aspects come to a head. It’s a nice change from how many stories paint teenagers as having no idea as to who they are while still showing they have plenty of room to change and grow.
Kokoro Connect is an intriguing supernatural mystery, but I kept waiting for some wow moments to last longer than a page or two. The pieces were all there, but I just wasn’t blown away.