You read enough manga, watch enough anime, play enough video games, etc, you understand the hierarchy: the main lead or leads take center stage, you’ll have the side characters provide assistance/growth to said character, and villains/antagonists who push said main characters to their limits. Often times you won’t remember the side characters in a work, but some manage to stand out despite their limited appearances. In any case, a story can’t always succeed without a strong cast of characters, so it’s always important to have standout side characters in a work.
But can there be a manga where the main character…considers themselves a side character? Akane Tamura tests that theory in this romance manga!
A Side Character’s Love Story stars Nobuko Tanaka, who describes herself as plain and unassuming, and is generally shy around people. However, while on the job she has been on for a year, she’s fallen in love with one of her co-workers, Irie, who seems reliable and dependable. With a new (and somewhat aggressive) employee joining the fray, that employee’s actions end up changing how Nobuko begins to act, though in a way that manages to push her into doing things she never thought she could do before.
So the basic point of this manga is for Nobuko to put herself out there in a way she hasn’t before. There’s someone she likes, but due to her being almost cripplingly shy — she has a list of quirks that stop her from either doing or saying anything — nothing comes out of it. That is, until an action from other characters (either Irie or the new hire Abe) ends up leading her to summon a bit of courage and take action herself. In some ways it’s kinda sweet, and in that respect, the manga doesn’t appear like it’ll surprise you with some sort of unnecessary twist. At least, there won’t be a major shift until the characters, and specifically Nobuko, have grown in the proper manner.
But this is also one of the issues in this volume: the lack of some sort of twist. It’s literally just how Nobuko reacts or acts around Irie and how she tries to become more comfortable around people in general. Each story has a basic premise, and it will involve Nobuko fretting over or reliving her mistakes which she ends up carrying over to how she acts at work. There’s no real humor in the manga, nor is there a strong personality that stands out. That’s likely because the focus is too much on “the side character” Nobuko — and doesn’t get into her mindset. Like do we know why she’s so shy? Did something happen in her youth to cause this? Did her upbringing lead to this? The manga currently focuses on the present, which is fine, but the stories right now don’t stand out.
Which now gets us back to the side character thing. This manga doesn’t do the best job of making the person Nobuko has fallen for, Irie, stand out well. That probably is the issue: there’s no real standout character in this first volume. It’s you read it, think this is quite nice, hope something engaging happens, and before you know it, it’s over. The art is one thing that saves it, as the characters’ expressions (especially Nobuko) are awesome and sometimes humorous. But other than that, there’s not much memorable so far, and I can only hope something — a character that shakes things up, the introduction of her parents, an event Nobuko goes to — can break up some of the monotony.