Is the Order a Rabbit? Volume 1 Review

Having reviewed the anime adaptation of Is the Order a Rabbit? when all three seasons were released by MVM two-three years ago (which in my mind didn’t seem that long ago, but it’s a bigger gap than I had realised), it is great to finally get my hands, or rather paws, given the animalistic nature of the establishments at the heart of the story, on the original manga.

For those unfamiliar with it, the story is set in a Japanese town with a distinctly European flavour to it in terms of its architecture and cobbled streets. Cocoa Hoto has moved to the town, and is boarding at a café called “Rabbit House”, where she also ends up working, despite the fact she cannot tell the different flavours of coffee apart by taste. Also working at Rabbit House are Chino Kafu, the younger but more mature girl among Cocoa’s friends whose father owns the café, and Rize Tedeza, a girl who comes from a military family. The café also has a mascot, an angora rabbit named Tippy, who is seemingly a reincarnation of Chino’s dead grandfather, but Chino appears to notice this.

As Cocoa embraces her new surroundings, she also becomes friends with other people in town. They include Chiya Ujimatsu, a classmate at her new school who works at another café called Ama Usa An, where among other things she makes Japanese sweets with peculiar names such as Trinary Gleaming Jewels and Night’s Sky Reflection on the Waves; and Syaro Kirima, an elegant girl who works at a café specialising in herbal tea, who tries to hide the fact she is rather poor, and also acts drunk when she’s high on caffeine.

The first thing worth highlighting with this manga is that it is presented in the four-panel yonkoma style. As a result, when first reading this, it put me in mind of another Yen Press title, K-On!, a manga that also fits into the trope of cute girls doing cute things. Similarly, it also takes a bit longer to read than you might expect from a book which is only 136 pages long, or 118 if you discount the translation notes and pages used to advertise other titles.

Nevertheless, this humorous manga does provide plenty of moments to make you laugh. One of the best sections is when Cocoa gets her friends to do some bakery. Chino makes some bread that looks like Tippy, which, given the fact she knows the rabbit to be the reincarnation of her later grandfather, leads her to make the terrifying comment: “Time to bake grandpa”. When Chino decides to make some Tippy-bread too, she puts strawberry jam inside, leading Rize to think that it is rather morbid to put what looks like blood in rabbit bread. Another peculiar moment involving Tippy occurs when Chino tells Cocoa that Tippy is a female rabbit, but privately she thinks to herself: “Though not on the inside…” Given that the reincarnation of Chino’s granddad is inside a female body, does that mean in some way Tippy is transcoded?

As for the manga’s production, there is a lengthy translation notes section, and the book opens with some colour comics covering each of the five main characters which makes for a nice introduction. While nothing appears to be wrong with Giuseppe di Martino’s translation, occasionally the lettering from Rebecca Sze can be a bit hard to read. For example, Chiya writes a haiku on a coffee that Cocoa orders from her, which takes a little bit of time to process as you make a switch from reading black text on a white background, to reading white text on a shifting-grey background.

This is not the most confusing thing however. That occurs at the start of the manga where the table of contents is done like a menu. This is not a bad idea on the part of editors Shalini Arimilli and Carl Li, but for some reason they put a yen sign in front of the page numbers to look like they are prices, which threw me a bit when I first came across it. On the plus side, the opening chapter is only eleven yen, which is five pence. What a bargain!

Is the Order a Rabbit? makes for pleasant reading, and I for one now wish to go back and revisit the anime at some point.

Our review copy from Yen Press was supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.