Krystallina: At narrator Mayumi’s middle school, rumors abound of a so-called detective club that tends to cause more issues than it solves. On the eve of her birthday, Mayumi meets a strange sweet talker who offers his assistance. Mayumi intends to tell him her problem just to make him give up and go away, but her plan backfires when she’s dragged into the abandoned art room.
And thus begins days Mayumi couldn’t forget even if she wanted to.
Pretty Boy Detective Club: The Dark Star that Shines for You Alone is narrated by Mayumi as the Pretty Boy Detective Club take up her case: search for a star that she saw as a child. With her birthday being the deadline for her to “grow up” and abandon such childhood nonsense, Mayumi believes there’s little chance for them to succeed. Rather, it’s likely that interacting with these boys will be more trouble than it’s worth. There’s the delinquent who does the cooking, the student body president with the soothing voice, the silent artist and heir to the school’s benefactors, and the one who shows off his legs. Not to mention their leader, whom Mayumi doesn’t recognize but finds his overflowing compliments, positivity, and dedication to the concept of “beauty” off-putting.
I’m sure many people will associate Pretty Boy Detective Club with Ouran High School Host Club. After all, they both feature handsome young men in a ridiculous sounding school club; their leaders both are the type to compliment the ladies; and the heroine tends to think of them as annoying. Yeah, it’s a fair comparison to make. But if you remember the old CLAMP title CLAMP School Detectives (and its spin-offs), that’s a much closer comparison. Either way, the mystery here seems very childish and impossible to solve (finding a star that no one else has ever seen in about a day), but the story does not go how I expected. I don’t want to really go into how it evolves because, well, that’s the fun of the book.
Suffice to say, NISIOISIN carefully lays some plot points that come to bloom later in the novel, and even revealing the truth is only half the story.
The characters…well, they’re something all right. Mayumi initially dislikes everyone because of typical middle school jealousy (Mayumi is described as rather gloomy), but the guys can also be irritating. For instance, Michiru’s sharp tongue is full of verbal slams and sarcastic remarks, but other “quirks” will not go over well for all audiences. Hyota and Nagahiro are both described and joked about as being perverts (for different reasons), and if lolicon jokes and the like make you uncomfortable, it may be hard to get past that. Just like all harems, each member brings something different to the group, and Mayumi’s well-written narration highlights their individual eccentricities and their talents.
The Dark Star that Shines for You Alone is formatted a bit like a webnovel, as it is made up of 32 chapters, mostly only a few pages long. This, combined with the novel’s compact size, makes it the type you can easily carry around and read a chapter or two when you have a spare moment, and at 250 pages, I expected to read this here and there. Instead, I ended up marathoning the novel in one evening. One of the rules of the Pretty Boy Detective Club is to “be a boy”, and while that is gender discrimination, Manabu is instead more focused on the idea of childhood and adventure. That’s a central theme of the novel and you could classify this as the opposite of a coming-of-age story.
Here’s one thing disappointing about this first volume of Pretty Boy Detective Club: there’s a lack of pretty boy pictures. Outside of the opening illustration, readers won’t get to admire these handsome young men as they try to solve the case.
Otherwise, beyond some of the humor that can be an acquired taste, Pretty Boy Detective Club: The Dark Star that Shines for You Alone is a spirited read about the crossroads of adolescence and a mystery that appears to be as ridiculous as the ones pursuing the truth. Fortunately, Manabu and the others deliver a story that is worthy of their self-proclaimed aesthetics.
Krystallina’s rating: 5 out of 5
Helen: Middle-schooler Mayumi Dojima is trying to put childish things behind her, but on the eve of her 14th birthday she finds herself in front of a most unusual, and childish, club: the Pretty Boy Detective Club. She’d only heard rumors about this club before but now she’s confronted by the four most infamous boys at her school, led by another she’s never heard of, and these boys seem oddly taken with her mystery. Ten years ago, Mayumi saw a dark star that she’s never been able to find again and, just before her self-imposed deadline to give up on finding this star, the Pretty Boy Detective Club is taking on her case!
This is the first time I’m reading one of NISIOISIN’s works, although I have seen the anime adaptations of Katanagatari and parts of Monogatari, and I would like to give props to the staff at Vertical who made this book read so smoothly. While I certainly got annoyed at the writing at times, my annoyance was directed at the contents of the words, not the easy way the structure and vocabulary seemed to flow. NISIOISIN is known for his wordplay and there were several sections in this volume that felt so clever I had to remember that it wasn’t written in English originally; it’s a translation that reads very well even if I was rather “meh” on the story it was telling.
Like most light novels, The Dark Star that Shines for You Alone wasn’t a particularly long story but at points it just seemed to drag. Part of this may have had to do with how the story favored short chapters over long ones, which makes you feel as if you’ve read far more than you actually have, but I feel as if Mayumi’s story would have worked better as a short story than a full light novel. There was more to the mystery than I first expected — it went in a rather wild direction actually — but in the end, the story is more about Mayumi accepting the feelings of her child self as valid instead of just tossing aside her childhood “dreams” as she steps closer to adulthood than the mystery.
It’s an interesting idea and a period that I think a lot of people go through (such as when you fully embrace the “cringe” things you did as a teenager without feeling shame about them) but Mayumi just felt a bit too young for me to fully buy into this story. There are very serious 14-year-olds of course, but in my experience it tends to be a bit of a different kind of seriousness than the “adult” kind of seriousness Mayumi displays, and I found that ironic considering that one of the rules of the Pretty Boy Detective Club is “be a boy,” i.e a child.
It appears that Mayumi is sticking around the story for a bit longer and even though I didn’t dislike her (she’s my favorite character of the series, all of the boys just annoyed me in different ways, sorry Vertical Twitter manager) I just don’t see myself coming back for volume 2. I’m still interested in reading some of NISIOISIN’s other works, especially since so many of them are available in English now, but Dark Star was a bit too plodding and navel-gazing for my taste.
Helen’s rating: 2.5 out of 5