When I talk about shojo I was into when I first started reading manga, like many my age, the one’s that come to mind are Ouran High School Host Club, Vampire Knight, Say I Love You, and Dengeki Daisy. But there was another: Love So Life. I think this ultimately just doesn’t come to mind as often since it never got licensed in English. Which I can’t really blame any publishers for since it’s a long series (17 volumes), now an ‘older shojo’ (2008-2015) and has the problematic element of being an age-gap romance between a teenager and an established adult. And to be clear, that element is a slow burn and nothing even happens until she’s an adult, but I get that’s a concept that will put off a lot of people. Honestly, themes like this generally don’t bother me in fiction, particularly if it’s portrayed like this and nothing really happens until later.
The original story is about Shiharu, an orphaned high school girl who works part-time at a daycare (she wants to go into this line of work as an adult) and ends up also working as a babysitter for one of their clients, Seiji. He’s a newsreader whose brother has run off and left him with a pair of two-year-old twins after their mother passed away, and he just can’t cope on his own. Shiharu is happy to help and soon falls in love with the kids as well as Seiji.
Anyway, in 2020 I discovered that mangaka Kaede Kouchi had started writing a sequel, Life So Happy. Rather than Shiharu, this followed the story of the twins who were now older and in elementary school, facing their own problems. Although this started in 2016, it didn’t finish until 2023, so when I picked it up, it was still ongoing. I bought Volume 1 in March 2020 but didn’t read it until May (or maybe I was reading it and just didn’t finish it until then since reading in Japanese was still horribly slow back then). I was happy to be reunited with the characters I loved so much and enjoyed the first instalment. But although Volumes 2 & 3 were already out, I held off buying them until June 2022. Maybe I had just been discouraged about my reading abilities back in ’20, or maybe I was just waiting for a sale. I’m not sure. But I did get them read in July ’22, so they didn’t sit around in the backlog for long.
The bigger crime was the final volume, #4. This was released in June 2023, and I had it on pre-order, so it had been sitting there waiting for me… all the way through until this month. Almost three years later. Even I’m not sure why I left it so long, particularly when #3 ended with a cliffhanger. Traditionally, the summer is very busy at work, and it’s possible it just got lost among that, and that’s all there was to it.
Having finished the series now, I’m struck again with the feeling that I’m grateful I found my way back to this manga. Love So Life isn’t a series I ever expected to continue in any form, but I’m glad it did because the twins had interesting stories of their own to tell now that they’re older. It feels like a good addition to the story and not some kind of forced sequel like some series fall into. The old, just because it’s popular, I should write more trap.
And it’s one of those instances where I’m glad I started learning Japanese because it’s not something I’d get to read otherwise, since, as mentioned, Love So Life is highly unlikely to be licensed, and there’s no real world in which Life So Happy works without the original. Sometimes old favourites find their way back to you in a different form, and this is one of those.