Boys Be... Review: The Teenage Romance Manga That Talked to Boys Like Adults

Romance manga that talks honestly to teenage boys about what they're feeling. This is rarer than it should be.

Quick Take

• Anthology-style romance stories from the male perspective, unusual in manga's genre landscape
• Honest about teenage male emotions — the insecurity, the longing, the frequent failure
• Tokyopop only released 14 of 22 volumes; the series is incomplete in English

Who Is This Manga For?

• Readers who enjoyed I''s or Video Girl Ai and want similar emotional territory
• People interested in how romance manga addresses teenage boys as emotional subjects rather than simple desire machines
• Fans of anthology-style storytelling where each volume has its own complete arc
• Anyone curious about early 2000s romance manga aesthetics

Content Warnings & Age Rating

Age Rating: T (Teen) Content Warnings: Sexual references, romantic situations, some mature themes handled in the context of teenage relationships

Relatively tame by contemporary standards; pushes the T-rating in places.

Yu's Rating

Category	Score
Story Depth	★★★☆☆
Art Style	★★★★☆
Character Development	★★★☆☆
Accessibility for Non-Japanese Readers	★★★★☆
Reread Value	★★★☆☆

Story Overview

Boys Be... is structured around a loose cast of recurring characters — high school boys and the girls in their lives — but functions mostly as an anthology of romantic episodes. Each chapter or short arc focuses on a different interaction: a boy working up courage to confess, the complicated aftermath of rejection, the gap between what someone wants and what they can say.

The dominant mode is bittersweet. The stories don't usually end cleanly. Boys fail to say what they mean. Girls have their own desires that don't align with what the boys hope for. First love is often clumsy and unrequited and remembered forever anyway.

What distinguished Boys Be... when it was published in Weekly Shonen Magazine was the specific address to teenage boys about their romantic inner lives. Shonen manga at the time was not known for this. The stories acknowledged that teenage boys are confused, insecure, and full of feelings they don't know how to manage — and it treated this as worth exploring rather than ignoring.

The ongoing characters (Kyoichi and Chiharu being the most prominent) provide continuity between the episodic stories.

Characters

Kyoichi Kanzaki — The central recurring protagonist: earnest, occasionally dense about his own feelings, improving slowly in how he relates to the people he cares about.

Chiharu Nitta — Kyoichi's closest female friend and the gravitational center of the ongoing storyline. Her patience with him is a form of affection she expresses indirectly for most of the series.

Supporting boys — The various male characters in episodic stories are recognizably specific types (the confident idiot, the sensitive overthinker, the one who doesn't understand social cues) that avoid becoming parody.

Art Style

Tamakoshi draws clean, expressive characters with a softness that fits the emotional register. The faces convey nuanced emotional states without overstatement. Nothing visually groundbreaking, but consistently readable and warm.

Cultural Context

The specific cultural context of Japanese high school romance — the cultural rituals around confession, the significance of summer festivals and cultural days, the weight of third year before college entrance exams — runs through every story. Some context helps Western readers understand why certain moments are weighted the way they are.

The framing device in some chapters — a narrator's voice speaking directly to the reader as a teenage boy — was unusual for manga at the time and reflected a specific editorial choice about what boys needed from their weekly magazine.

What I Love About It

I find the failures more interesting than the successes.

The stories where the boy doesn't get the girl — where the confession goes wrong, where the timing is off, where he realizes he was projecting what he wanted rather than seeing who she actually is — are more honest and more affecting than the happy endings. Not because I want the characters to suffer, but because these stories are honest about the shape of first love: how often it's about the feeling inside yourself rather than the actual person in front of you.

There's a story (I won't spoil which one) where a boy realizes, mid-confession, that he doesn't know this girl as well as he thought he did. The specific expression Tamakoshi draws on his face in that moment — not heartbreak, but a kind of startled self-awareness — is the best single image in the series.

What English-Speaking Fans Say

A small but warm English fanbase. Most readers discovered it through Tokyopop in the early 2000s and have fond memories of it. The incomplete English release is the persistent frustration — Tokyopop released 14 of 22 volumes before the company collapsed.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The Kyoichi and Chiharu arc in the later volumes — when their "just friends" dynamic reaches the point where it can't stay that way — is the series' most emotionally satisfying material. The scene where Kyoichi finally says what he's been not-saying for volumes is handled without dramatics, in an ordinary setting, which is exactly right.

Similar Manga

Title	Its Approach	How Boys Be... Differs
I''s	Male protagonist's complicated romantic feelings	Boys Be... is an anthology rather than a single continuous story
Video Girl Ai	Romance with supernatural element	Boys Be... is grounded and realistic throughout
His and Her Circumstances (Kare Kano)	Double perspective on high school romance	Boys Be... stays in the male perspective and is more episodic

Reading Order / Where to Start

Volume 1, in order. Note that Tokyopop's English release ends at Volume 14 of a 22-volume series.

Official English Translation Status

Tokyopop published volumes 1-14 in English before the company's collapse. The series is complete in Japanese at 22 volumes. The English release covers approximately the first two-thirds of the story.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Honest treatment of teenage male emotional life, unusual in manga
• Individual stories work well as standalone episodes
• Warm art style that matches the emotional content
• Good pacing for anthology format

Cons

• English release is incomplete at 14 of 22 volumes
• Anthology format means less character development than continuous narratives
• Some stories resolve too neatly; others resolve too ambiguously
• The episodic structure can feel repetitive across the full run
• May feel emotionally thin compared to more focused romances

Is Boys Be... Worth Reading?

For 14 volumes in English, yes — with the caveat that the story doesn't complete. The individual stories are enjoyable, and the honest address to teenage boys about their emotional lives is worth encountering. Just know you'll need fan translations to finish.

Format Comparison

Format	Pros	Cons
Physical	Soft art reads well in physical format	Out of print; incomplete English release
Digital	Easier to find	—
Omnibus	No omnibus available	—

Where to Buy

Read the first volume. If it doesn't hook you, put it down. It'll hook you.

Start with Volume 1 →

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