Machi Morimoto’s parents will not stop nagging her to get married, even though she has no interest in marrying anyone (and certainly not any of the super-successful young men her parents keep sending her profiles of). Seemingly on a whim, Morimoto’s old friend Agaya Hana proposes taking advantage of the Shibuya City same-sex marriage ordinance and shutting up Morimoto’s parents that way!
Of course, to apply for this marriage license both parties have to actually live in Shibuya, and Agaya’s apartment is undergoing renovations so she needs somewhere to live anyway. Suddenly it seems like Agaya is getting far more out of this “fake” marriage than Morimoto is!
This one-shot is far fluffier than Kodama Naoko’s previous work NTR: Netsuzou Trap, both in terms of mood (Kodama jokes in the author notes that NTR was a “Dark Kodama” work and that this is a “Light Kodama” work) and in terms of substance. Surprisingly enough, even one full volume of I Married My Best Friend To Shut My Parents Up seems to be stretching the idea to its limit; the story is very bare bones in its structure, and this standard-length volume even includes a completely unrelated one-shot to fill out its length (As a side note, the characters in the one-shot looked so similar to the characters in the main story that I was genuinely confused at first by the sudden setting change. Kodama’s strengths do not appear to include drawing a variety of visually-different characters).
The structure of this story is incredibly rote: Morimoto’s problem with her parents is established, she’s uncomfortable with Agaya moving in at first but starts to warm up to the idea, Agaya begins to put some moves on Morimoto (it’s absolutely no surprise that Agaya has been harboring genuine romantic feelings for Morimoto for the entire time they’ve known each other), Morimoto rejects the advances at first but then seems to “give in” and settles into a life with Agaya that’s closer than roommates but not quite as close as a married couple.
With that resolved, I Married My Best Friend tosses in a chapter of Agaya suddenly having concerns, briefly running away, Morimoto bringing her back, and the status quo is restored, end of story!
I just found the incredibly uninspired execution of the “fake marriage” trope here to be rather disappointing, especially given that Morimoto faces real (but ultimately brief) pushback from her parents over marrying another woman and not one of their hand-picked male suitors. I felt like there was a lot more character depth for Kodama to plumb, even for a single volume work like this.
I don’t have any interest in reading NTR so it will likely be a long time before I give another of Kodama’s works another shot and see if she’s figured out how to draw her characters more distinctively (and boobs, she draws what are frankly some of the worst “realistic” boobs I’ve ever seen in a manga, so much so that at first I was positive that Kodama was a man based on just how bad they were!).