fffriday | Run Away with Me, Girl

Happy Friday all!

I came across Run Away with Me, Girl (Kakeochi Girl) while browsing around pretty randomly and ended up quite enjoying it. It's a four-volume josei manga, with a refreshingly distinct and expressive artstyle, that I would describe as a bit of a subversion of the "S-class romance" trope: grad student Maki's childhood girlfriend Midori, who had seemed to move on as societally acceptable, shows back up in her life pregnant and engaged -- but all is not well in Midori's supposed paradise, and it's time for Maki to get serious about the title drop. The external obstacles are obvious, but I especially appreciated the depiction of their internal conflicts: each of the deuteragonists is at a different point in their journey to overcome the different ways they're inclined to acquiesce to expectations or individual pressures, and I enjoyed the difficult and imperfect ways in which they got in their own and each others' ways as they struggled with the cards they were dealt.

The first three volumes are officially available in English translation as ebooks only, but it looks like the publisher didn't pick up the fourth and final volume, which is of course where a lot of resolution happens. Unfortunate, although of course the fans picked up the slack in their own way. (See comments, I am misinformed!)

Despite the overall happy arc, the manga does cover some fairly heavy stuff and isn't a lighthearted read. Besides what's obvious from the description above, a major subplot involves prolonged emotional abuse with an incident of domestic violence, and there is a flashback of being verbally pressured into unsafe sex.