Is the Order a Rabbit? Volume 2 Review
With the announcement last weekend that the anime adaptation of Is the Order a Rabbit? is to get another series, it seems as good a time as any to revisit the original manga.
Things have begun to settle down since Cocoa Hoto finally arrived at the Rabbit House café, where she is staying, partly to study at a nearby school but also to work. She has got used to working alongside the younger-but-more-mature Chino Kafu, daughter of the cafe’s owner, as well as her military-minded co-worker Rize Tedeza. She also made new friends while in town who work in similar businesses, with Chiya Ujimatsu running the more traditional Ama Usa An coffee shop as well as attending the same school as Cocoa; and Syaro Kirima, working at the tea house Fleur de Lapin, who tries her best to hide how poor she really is from Cocoa.
In this volume we follow Cocoa as she tries to get a photo of the normally serious Chino smiling and we learn that Chiya is not the best when it comes to physical activity, but she is brilliant at dodging things. Riza decides to taken on jobs at the other cafés in order to raise money for an expensive Father’s Day present after she used an expensive bottle of wine to kill a bug and Syaro is finally unable to hide the truth about her poverty from her friends.
We also see the arrival of some new characters. Two of them are Maya and Megu, who are classmates of Chino and sometimes help out at Rabbit House. This ends up delighting Cocoa, who as the youngest of four girls finally gets the opportunity to get someone to call her their big sister. The other is Blue Mountain Aoyama, a novelist who writes several books which link to rabbits, and has a connection to Chino’s late grandfather.
As mentioned in the review of the previous volume, Is the Order a Rabbit? is written in the four-panel yonkoma style, and thus while it is a short manga in terms of page count, it does take a while to get through. However, this is not a negative point. There are plenty of moments to enjoy in this edition. My personal favourite was Cocoa suggesting to Chino that they watch a DVD together. However, the DVD she got was borrowed from Rize, and what she got was a horror film called Silence of the Bunnies.
The production of the manga is good too. Translator Giuseppe di Martino and letter Rebecca Sze keep up the quality of the first volume, as do editors Shalini Arimilli and Carl Li. The manga comes with an introductory colour chapter, and there are plenty of translation notes in the back as well.
With the anime series returning, fans may want to start getting these first two opening volumes now as a refresher. I for one will certainly plan to watch the new run if it becomes available to stream over here.
Our review copy was supplied by Yen Press.
