Crayon Days Review: The Country Girl Who Wanted to Be Special

When I was a kid, drawing was the one thing I did that nobody could take away from me. I wasn't good at it. I knew I wasn't good at it. But on the days when school felt like a wall I couldn't climb, a pencil and the back of a notebook were enough. So when I picked up Crayon Days — くれよん・でいず — and met a girl who is described, flat out, as completely ordinary in face, in figure, and in grades, but who loves to draw, I felt that old pull right away. This is a small four-volume shojo from Sho-Comi, and I read it in a couple of quiet evenings. It's not famous. But it knows something true about wanting to be more than you are.

Quick Take

• A four-volume Sho-Comi romance by Kozue Chiba about an art-school dorm, talent, and a girl who refuses to stay ordinary
• The classic "I hate him / oh no I don't" setup, but grounded in real anxiety about whether you're actually any good at the thing you love
• Rated T (Teen) — clean shojo romance, nothing explicit, safe for most readers

Story Overview

Shima Ichinose is sixteen and completely, painfully average. She grew up in the deep countryside, her grades are normal, her looks are normal, and at home her parents' attention goes mostly to her sickly younger sister. The one thing she has is that she loves to draw. So she decides she's going to become a "special" girl, and she leaves home for the city to enroll at Aoba Art Academy, a boarding school with its own dorm.

The turning point comes on day one. She meets Akatsuki Saji, a boy already called a "genius" at sixteen — and whose personality is the exact opposite of what that word makes you expect. He mocks her, looks down on her, and even goads her by asking if she'll model nude for him. They end up classmates, seated right next to each other, the person she can least stand parked at the next desk over. From there it's the slow grind of a rival becoming something else: he starts noticing her work, and he's gradually overwhelmed less by her talent than by the raw, unguarded intensity she throws at everything.

The back half complicates it. Akatsuki's ex-girlfriend, Touko, returns from abroad and pairs up with him as his painting partner, which leaves Shima to start a piece for the Aoba Festival entirely on her own. The story doesn't end on the festival, though — it carries through to the two of them chasing their dreams together, and the final pages jump forward to an ending I won't spoil up here. It's a happy resolution, even if some readers felt it wrapped a touch quickly.

Characters

Shima Ichinose is the heart of it, and what makes her work is that she isn't secretly gifted. She's stubborn and earnest and tries too hard, and the gap between how much she loves drawing and how ordinary her results are is the actual engine of the book. The detail that gutted me: at home, her parents' focus is on her ill little sister, so part of "I want to be special" is really "I want to be seen." That's not a romance cliché. That's a real ache.

Akatsuki Saji is the "guy I hate" of the subtitle — a sixteen-year-old labeled a genius whose attitude is rotten enough to make you understand why she can't stand him. His arc is the slow erosion of that arrogance. He starts mocking her, and ends up unable to bear the thought of being apart from her, drawn in by the heat she puts into her work rather than by any polish.

Touko is the ex who comes back from overseas and becomes Akatsuki's painting partner. She's the wedge that splits the two leads for the climax, forcing Shima to stand on her own creative feet rather than leaning on him.

Sarasa Ando and Sena Kisaragi are Shima's dorm neighbors. Sarasa is beautiful and sharp-tongued; Sena is the soft-looking one — and the two of them are in a relationship with each other, which the book treats as simply part of dorm life rather than a spectacle. There's also Mayuge, a little parakeet with eyebrow-like markings on its face, which is exactly the kind of small warm detail this dorm-life manga is good at.

What I Love About It

The thing I keep coming back to is the source of Shima's "I want to be special." On the surface this is a standard shojo motivation — country girl goes to the big city to chase a dream. But the manga grounds it in something quieter and sadder: at home, her parents pour their attention into her frail younger sister, and Shima has learned to take up as little space as possible. Going to art school isn't only ambition. It's the first time she lets herself want to be looked at.

That reframes the whole romance for me. When Akatsuki — the genius who has had eyes on him his entire life — starts actually seeing her, it isn't just a crush landing. It's a girl who has been background in her own family suddenly being treated as foreground by the one person whose attention is supposed to mean the most. I love that the manga puts her ordinariness right in the synopsis instead of pretending she's a secret prodigy. Most shojo heroines get told they're plain and then turn out to be quietly stunning. Shima is just normal, and the story respects that, and it makes her want to be more feel earned instead of false. As someone who drew badly and loved it anyway, that honesty about being average at the thing you love hit a spot most romance manga don't even aim for.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The beat that sticks with me is the Aoba Festival stretch in the back half. Touko comes back from abroad and becomes Akatsuki's painting partner, which pulls him out of orbit and leaves Shima to start her festival piece completely alone. After a whole series of being the one chasing him, being looked down on and then slowly noticed, she's suddenly the one left to prove something by herself — not as his rival, not as his project, just as a painter with a blank canvas.

And the quiet turn is that it's Akatsuki who can't take the distance. The boy who opened the series mocking her and asking her to model finds he can't stand being separated from her. The power has flipped: the genius is the one who needs the ordinary girl, not the other way around. That inversion is the payoff the whole "I hate that guy" premise was building toward, and it lands because the manga spent four volumes earning it. The ending then leaps ahead in time — I'll leave the final image for you to find — and it recasts everything as a story that was always headed somewhere lasting.

Pros & Cons

Pros:

• A genuinely ordinary heroine whose drive to be "special" is rooted in real family neglect, not fake modesty
• Tight four-volume length — it starts, develops the rivalry-to-romance, and lands without dragging
• Warm dorm-life cast, including a casually-handled same-sex couple and one excellent eyebrowed parakeet

Cons:

• The ending wraps up fast; even fans who enjoyed it noted it feels slightly rushed
• Akatsuki's early behavior (the nude-model goading) is a hard "rude rival" opener that some readers will bounce off of
• It's a short, low-key art-school romance with no English release — quiet and unflashy, so it won't work for everyone

Is Crayon Days Worth Reading?

If you want a complete, four-volume shojo romance where the "plain girl" is actually plain and the dream of being special comes from somewhere genuinely tender, yes — it's worth the couple of evenings it takes. If you need a long epic or a flashy hook, this gentle little book probably isn't for you.

Where to Buy

No English release yet. That just means you find it before everyone else does. There's no licensed English edition, so the Japanese print and digital release is the only legitimate way to read it.

Search for it on Amazon.co.jp →

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