When you pick up a manga by Takemoto Izumi, you can be sure of several things: The girls will be cute, the guys nice; the lead character will be odd, but charming, and; there will be cosplay, however thinly veiled the reason. The one thing you cannot be sure of is…a plot.

And so it is with Kokome Futeiten (ここめ不定点), a slice-of-life story set in a high school, starring Mugihatake Kokome, an unusually petite first-year, who is constantly mistaken for an elementary school student, and her friends Yukari, who looks positively adult next to Kokome, and the manga club president who actually is an elementary school age student in high school, Mimika.

Days pass quickly in this school, with many dress up scenes, visits to Comiket, and various club and school activities, as long as they afford opportunities for silly gags and cosplay. These include the spreading of memes and trends among the middle schoolers, the short-lived trend of calling Kokome “Kokome-sama”, and settling on “O-kome-chan,” and Kokome’s fame as a voice in the anime club’s hand-made anime.

Yuri pops up late in the manga when Mimika starts kissing her friends hello, apparently after the fashion of a classmate who is a Russian transfer student. Kokome looks forward to her kiss the next day and is bummed when Mimika says the teacher put the kibosh on the habit.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 5
Characters – 7
Yuri – 1
Service – 1

Overall – 7

There’s nothing here that you couldn’t show an 11-year old, but also it’d be a rare 11-year old that found it amusing….this kind of comic is the purview of adults looking back with sienna-tinted nostalgia on school life.