Kashimashi, Volume 1 Book

I received this book as a Christmas gift, as I'm up to read pretty much any shoujo manga I can get my hands on. I needed a new one to read, so this seemed good enough.

Let' s just say... it was interesting. Like most mangas, it only took me a couple hours in total to complete. The story was about a boy named Hazumu, who takes notice of all the beauty around him and is even told by one of the three main characters, Yasuna, that he has "the power to make the world beautiful". He has always been thought of as a bit feminine and fragile, and has been picked on since childhood. His childhood friend, Tomari, has always acted as sort of a body guard for him, in the process secretly developing feelings for him. One night, after being rejected by Yasuna when he finally had the guts to ask her out, he runs off to the mountains. Then, BOOM! He is squashed by an alien spaceship. That' s where the story starts to get really bizarre.

The aliens reconstruct his body, but for they accidentally make him a girl. For some unexplained reason, this is irreversible. Oops. And if what has happened so far isn't unrealistic enough, everyone around Hazumu starts acting like he/she can just automatically adjust to this change. All the guys around her, including her former best guy friend, suddenly start acting like HUGE perverts, and both of the girls that used to have a crush on him are just plain shocked, but still sort of forcing her to become girlish. Her parents are oddly delighted about the accident, and seem hardly concerned about Hazumu's feelings. These are some of the many reasons why I found that the plot didn't really fit together, or make sense.

It was an interesting idea for a story I guess; a guy suddenly being forced into the confusion of being a teenage girl. But, all said and done, it just wasn't something that worked. At least not for me. In a way, it was interesting, or at least enough so that I read to the end, but I don't think I would recommend it to anybody. It was just too unrealistic for me, with too many unexplained concepts that were just forced on the reader.

Maybe someone else would enjoy this type of story,it just wasn't one for me, other than to occupy a few lazy hours of my day.