Virgin Love Volumes 3 and 4 Review

Tina Yamashina’s Virgin Love has come to an end after running for four volumes. With the first two being a little bit all over the place in terms of focus, how will the third and fourth volumes handle the pacing and bring the story to a conclusion? Let’s take a closer look and find out!

As we reunite with the cast, we find protagonist Shoko upset after her Christmas Eve date with Kei faced an unexpected setback. Now she’s not sure how she feels about him as the distance between them continues to grow. Tanaka, on the other hand, is beginning to grow fed up of watching Shoko chase after Kei, and when the Love House housemates all decide to take a hot spring trip to celebrate the New Year, Tanaka unintentionally lets slip some of his hidden feelings.

When Shoko later goes to a friend’s wedding, she discusses her romance problems with her friends. She lays out all the facts about Kei and Tanaka, who are both interested in her, and universally, the group agree that Shoko would be better off with Tanaka. Later, Shoko asks her housemate what their idea of the perfect married life is and discovers that Tanaka’s desires match up with hers perfectly! Now she’s even more conflicted about who she should pursue a relationship with.

That leads us into Volume 4, which, as many of you might expect, ends up being the time for Shoko to finally make a decision one way or the other. She’s still torn between the safe choice of dating Tanaka or continuing to pursue Kei, who is the only one to make her heart flutter. With the societal pressure of being older and feeling that she should settle down, it’s a challenging decision for our heroine to make – even if the answer is obvious to everyone else.

While I’ve enjoyed my time with Virgin Love overall, I do feel these last two volumes tend to go in circles when it comes to Shoko’s feelings. I liked Volume 2 of the series because it swapped the focus to one of the other housemates, but these two volumes are entirely set around Shoko, so we don’t get that change of pace. There are some small moments involving the extended cast, but since we’ve not had a great deal of time to develop them, it’s hard to feel invested in their stories.

Ultimately, I think that is my biggest problem with the series. The premise sets itself up to follow a group of people looking to find love in the Love House, and then it doesn’t do a whole lot with it besides Shoko. And as a pure romance story, it ends up irritating in places because it feels like the story beats repeat. Shoko commits herself to Kei, something happens, she wobbles, recommits, something else creeps up – rinse and repeat.

And this is a shame because, on the whole, I like Tina Yamashina’s artwork and characterisations. What we do see of the extended cast and their stories is engaging, and I don’t doubt that if we’d had the opportunity to see more of that, it would have been quite interesting. Even Shoko’s tale isn’t bad, it’s just hindered by being so repetitive. And I’ll go one further and say that while both Tanaka and Kei have grown as people throughout the series, Shoko feels rooted in the past with the same problems that plagued her originally. This is something that Shoko even says herself, but Yamashina just doesn’t build on that at all.

I think there’s still enjoyment to be found in Virgin Love, especially if you can get invested in Shoko’s story. It’s certainly not a bad series, it just hasn’t managed to live up to the expectations I placed on it early on.

Virgin Love Volume 3 and 4 come to the West thanks to Kodansha under the Vertical imprint. Both releases are translated by JM Iitomo Crandall and read well. While there are no colour pages, both volumes do include some side stories as bonuses. Tina Yamashina has had a short 2 volume series run in the magazine Dessert since this ended, but so far that hasn’t been licensed for an English release.

Overall, Virgin Love left me feeling disappointed as it shifted all of the side cast into the background to pursue having Shoko go in circles about her love life. It’s not even a bad series, it’s just flawed and built upon a far more interesting premise than what it ultimately delivered.

Our review copies from Kodansha (Vertical) were supplied by Turnaround Comics (Turnaround Publisher Services).