A lot of manga titles make no sense. This one is self-explanatory: down-on-her-luck Yae reunites with a childhood friend, Takumi, who suggests she play his fake wife so that he can deter all his female admirers. Yae is desperate enough to agree, thinking there won’t be a problem.
She quickly learns two things: Takumi’s life as a successful architect has propelled him to a world unlike what Yae is used to, and he’s also far more comfortable with physical intimacy.
Unlike in a lot of similar stories, this fake relationship is not one between strangers (like in Happy Marriage?!) nor between best friends who need to lie for some reason. The two hail from the same small town but haven’t been in contact for six years. This adds both a level of intimacy and awkwardness that I think helps the story. Yae is neither enthralled with him or hates his guts; she knows Takumi well enough to agree to such a plot in the first place but he’s also the kind of lech that she would have avoided otherwise.
Yes, even the author says that “this manga’s Takumi is a creep.” He freely admits to Yae he has played the field and is only stopping because they’re a pain and interfering with work. However, he’s up for some fun with Yae. Our Fake Marriage includes quite a few risqué scenes of Takumi touching Yae, but she’s clearly uncomfortable even though her body reacts. Although he has stopped based on Yae’s reactions, he is still sexually aggressive and has narcissistic tendencies.
Those traits aren’t uncommon for male leads in female-oriented manga, but when the author introduces her male lead is a jerk, you know he’s definitely a jerk. Yes, there’s a more-than-slight possibility that what Yae is assuming are cover stories about their relationship are actually nuggets of truth. At the same time, though, I find it hard to believe that if he’s liked Yae for years he would have fallen out of contact with her and not been at least popping up and teasing her.
I think it’s these six years that will be key to the manga. Yae surely had a reason to come to Tokyo, but why has she been stuck as a part-timer? Why did their meetups stop? How much romantic experience has she had? I have a lot of questions that will help fill in the rather rushed setup. For now, the manga is content with Yae going to events as Takumi’s wife and him getting randy. Including glamping, which I only learned was a thing today.
Like a lot of similar heroines, Yae is naïve and bit too practical (eating salt to save money). But she also has a lot of relatable haplessness instead of just being an incompetent waif or some kind of freaky bad luck magnet. The look that Yae has when she realizes that she was utterly turned down for a job and the swirl of questions of what went wrong with her interview…been there, done that way too many times. Her comedic expressions add a lot of charm to the manga.
Speaking of looks, Yae also looks like a dead ringer for some of the shoujo heroines drawn by Natsumi Ando. Except maybe for Yae’s choice in undergarments, the characters look closer to being teenagers rather than adults near their 30s. This is Tokina’s first long-running series, so perhaps we’ll see things change as the manga gets spicier.
And no doubt it will get spicier. While Our Fake Marriage will concentrate on Yae and Takumi getting closer (in more ways than one), I still want to know about their shared and independent histories. Don’t necessarily need an explanation for his womanizing, but Takumi is in need of being more endearing to readers.