Life has been a lonely and scary thing for a nameless creature, recently named Heath. Heath has been called a monster by humans as long as she can remember and after the verbal abuse and scorn became too much to bear, she lashed out at the villagers and has been living an isolated life in the mountains ever since. She’s terrified of humans and what they could do to her if they found her again, but when she runs into an unexpected visitor on her mountain, a blind girl named Lily, Heath’s life begins to bloom in unexpected ways.
I’m a bit torn on the core concept of “a ‘monster’ finds love in a girl who can’t see her.” On the one hand it’s nice to see a disabled character in fiction who doesn’t have awesome abilities compensating for said disability; an example of the opposite of this would be Hyakkimaru in the current anime Dororo who has been blind (among other things) since birth but has a form of supernatural vision that lets him see living items and several characters comment that this makes him an even better demon-slayer than a regular human would be. Lily lost her vision at a young age and there are a few moments when she expresses frustration — not at her blindness itself but how it means people will never take her triumphs at face value or how her blindness does make it more difficult for her to live independently and she feels a bit guilty over the extra work this means the people around her must do instead. Overall manga-ka Neji does have Lily live an independent life and one that feels appropriate for a young women who is still a bit naive and just venturing out into the world for the first time.
On the other hand, the premise of the story is “Heath is able to make an initial connection with the one person who can’t be scared of how they look” and that puts Lily into more of a “disable people are ‘pure’ and saviors” position than I’d like. Lily is perceptive and quickly guesses that Heath isn’t all who she says to be, like that Heath isn’t actually some great world traveler, and once Heath and Lily become physically involved it’s clear that Lily loves Heath’s body in every way and is every bit aware of what Heath’s body looks like. But, despite Neji doing everything “right” with Lily’s characterization, that “disabled savior” trope which kicks off the entire story nagged at me until the very end.
Otherwise, I enjoyed this one-shot which felt like the perfect length for Heath and Lily’s story. It’s just long enough to show their story from the initial “meet cute” to the point where they are starting to have more in-depth conversations about what they want out of this relationship with each other and starting to experiment with physical intimacy. I would recommend it to romance and yuri fans, albeit with those caveats about Lily’s semi-“disabled savior” status, since I know some readers are even more tired of those tropes than I am, and I plan on keeping an eye out for any of Neji’s other work available in English.