One Week Friends, Vol. 5

I'm not really a fan of drama in books. It feels old and overplayed, it feels trite and unimportant sometimes, and I just can't get a grasp of what I'm supposed to feel for characters whose motivations I hate. But in manga? Sure, lay it on me. The stakes feel lower, and there's something more real to me about drama I can see, rather than drama I imagine.

One Week Friends is a series I started a while ago and am slowly making my way through. It follows a small group of kids in school who, eventually, become friends after a rocky start. You see, one of them, Kaori, loses all of her memories at the start of each week after being in a car accident when she was younger. As a result, any attempt to befriend her essentially resets every week and causes most classmates to leave her alone. Yuuki is determined to be her friend though, and eventually convinces her to start keeping a journal of her memories, so she has something to reference the next week. With this new point of reference, Yuuki and Kaori become friends. Typical friend-y things happen in subsequent volumes, and their circle of friends grows a bit as a predictable result.

In the previous volume, we were introduced to Hajime, someone who was friends with Kaori when she was much younger before the car accident. As Yuuki and Kaori's friendship has deepened by this point (but still friends, just...y'know...closer friends), Yuuki sees Hajime as a rival for Kaori's attention. Yuuki doesn't know why Hajime bothers him so much (we, the readers, certainly could), and this volume is essentially the two of them butting heads over minor things, and Yuuki questioning his right as one of Kaori's friends.

It's dramatic. It's sweet. Probably a little too sweet, but I don't care. The art is nice, and I feel bad for basically everyone involved. The entire premise of the series seems to be increasingly sidelined though, as we haven't had to deal with Kaori's memory loss as a reader in a bit now. It feels a bit like we're going afield from where we started, but we'll see how things go.