As the cover suggests, Hero and Daisuke Hagiwara have begun to play “pair the spares” amongst the cast members of Horimiya who are currently not in a romantic relationship, and they’ve hit upon a rather good couple with Sakura and Yanagi. In a series where the couples often feel more different than alike, such as Miyamura’s initial gloomy, withdrawn atmosphere compared to Hori’s bubbly yet guarded one, or Remi and Sengoku’s sightly tsundere relationship, Sakura, the quiet student council girl, and Yanagi, the airheaded boy, are actually quite alike. They have the same interests, both get a little too internally anxious about themselves (without other people realizing it), and they both seem to unconsciously draw people to them. Like past volumes of Horimiya, only a part of this volume revolves around Sakura and Yanagi, the rest focuses on other characters including our titular couple.
But I actually wouldn’t have minded if even more of the volume was about Sakura and Yanagi since I enjoyed their quiet, geeky dynamic so much.
This volume did have one, reoccurring gag which I found a bit distasteful and this actually did involve Sakura. As noted in previous volumes, Hori has a fairly small chest and she’s self-conscious about it (although she never does the obvious thing and buy push-up bras or clothes that flatter her torso more). So, one morning Hori walks up to Sakura and instead of greeting her, Hori just starts fondling Sakura’s boobs without really getting consent (it’s clear that Sakura is uncomfortable around Hori for a bit afterwards and this simply isn’t something that real, female friends would do it to each other). There are ways this gag could have been funnier and less creepy, like when Sakura tries to reverse the situation by giving Hori a taste of her own medicine, only to have Hori reply “Her boobs are touching me, whoa, awesome,” which honestly was a funny result. But by this point in the series I doubt that the creators are going to mine the fact that girls can make some very deadpan silly jokes about each other’s bodies and combined with Hori’s past moments of biphobia, it does make me a little concerned that some less-savory thoughts from the creators are leaking into the series.
However, overall this volume was another installment filled with lots of good, “daily lives of high school sillies” gags. There’s not a gag on every single page but it’s pretty close, something I find impressive since non-comedy manga (I consider Horimiya to be more of a rom-com) doesn’t tend to be that joke-dense. It’s a different story for American newspaper strips or comedic, Western webcomics since those two mediums update in single, often daily, installments and therefore each page, each joke, each idea, has to land to retain readers. In some ways this means that manga has more flexibility, since they give readers an entire chapter at once and means more time on the page for the creator to arrange the jokes and beats, but Horimiya rises to the challenge and provides an incredible number of laughs in each volume with only a few stinkers each time, and this volume is no different.