by Luce, Staff Writer

Imagine you are a Japanese schoolgirl, and you’ve just realised you have a big crush on your friend! What do you do? Your options: 

A: pine ad infinitum. This crush goes to your grave. This is a pretty safe option, filled with yearning gazes and trying to hide your feelings, but someone more proactive might get there first, leaving you in a world of angst!

B: confess immediately. It’s a high risk option, but if you’re the gambling kind, it might pay off. After all, you’re already friends, so you know you get on. But be careful – it might make things pretty strained between you if they don’t return your affections…

C: try and win then over. You’re pretty sure they don’t see you romantically… yet. But there’s plenty of time for that to change, right? All you gotta do is show them how great you’d be as a couple – put on that winning smile, take them out on that date, and woo the heck out of them! 

How Do I Turn My Best Friend Into My Girlfriend?, Volume 1 which tells the story of Minami and Yuzu, who have been childhood friends since elementary school, firmly picks option C. They’ve been very close, physically and emotionally, for a long time, but when Minami accidentally overhears plot device guy confessing his love to Yuzu, she’s suddenly hit with the revelation that she’s in love with her. 

She has one chapter of panicking about this, notably absent of ‘but we’re both girls!’. After she admits it pretty easily to her other friend, Hinori, that she works with, who is thankfully supportive, she decides that the only option is to try and get Yuzu to think of her romantically. 

Not to say this necessarily goes that well, but she’s trying. It’s the thought that counts. Minami hasn’t ever liked anyone romantically, and has never dated anyone – and like any studious person in manga clueless on a subject, turns to textbooks! Hinori points out that none of those books are ‘textbooks’, and acts as a sensible hand to try and help. 

They end up on a date to the planetarium, because Yuzu is very into space. I now want a Saturn plushy. The date is cute and goes pretty well, but Minami feels like it’s getting her heart rate up more than Yuzu’s. Nonetheless, she does try to confess at the end, interrupted by some of the other friends…? 

This isn’t exactly a ground breaking manga, but it was quite refreshing in so much as Minami is actually trying. I love a good bit of pining, but sometimes it is nice to see someone going for what they want in a relationship. How I feel about it in the long term will largely ride on how long the ‘cannot spit it out’ continues. The situation presented at the end could go several ways, but it’s probably going to end up being a big misunderstanding for some conflict. Rather than drag its feet on getting them together, I’d actually like this manga to explore the transition from friends to lover, or focus on Yuzu a bit more – she doesn’t really show any signs of romantic affection for Minami, so it would be interesting if they explored that. 

All said, I will check into the next volume – it’s not the strongest Yuri manga out there, but if you like a more proactive protagonist and a complete lack of ‘but we’re both girls’, you could do a lot worse. 

Ratings:

Art: 7 
Story:
Service: 3, solely for an imagine spot where Minami is considering her feelings towards Yuzu, and one page says, without showing anything explicit, that is definitely sexual as well, or could/will grow that direction
Yuri: 9

Overall: 7

The translation and lettering all felt normal, that is too say I didn’t notice any glaring errors or oddities, which was done by Matthew Johnson and Giuseppe Antonio Fusco respectively. Volume 2 is due out in late September, as per the Seven Seas website.