My Special One Volume Two focuses heavily on Kouta’s backstory.

My Special One Volume Two
Written by: Momoko Koda
Publisher: Shueisha Inc.
English Publisher: VIZ Media
Release Date: May 2, 2023

At the end of Volume One, Sahoko confessed her feelings to Kouta, but he turned her down. Even though Sahoko realizes they can’t go back to the way they were, she can’t deny she still has feelings for him. As she’s wondering how to she’ll move forward from here, Sahoko’s mother brings her a magazine she found at the mini-mart with a scandalous article about Kouta’s past.

Just then, Sahoko gets a call from Asuma, one of Kouta’s bandmates. He asks Sahoko if she wants to help Kouta out, and of course she does. Asuma brings him over to Sahoko’s place and asks if Kouta can lie low at her place for a couple of days to avoid the paparazzi and wait for the scandal to die down. Sahoko’s mother agrees.

With what happened between Sahoko and Kouta at the end of the previous volume, this becomes an awkward enough situation. Things become even more awkward when Sahoko has to buy underwear for Kouta and then Kouta accidentally walking in on Sahoko as she’s preparing to take a bath. But when Kouta heads out into the public again, Sohoko becomes his biggest cheerleader both online and in person.

After an interaction between Sahoko and Kouta where Sahoko shows her support and says she believes in the part of himself that he’s shown her up to this point, we get an entire chapter focusing on the backstory that the scandalous article was based on. As we see here, the article got some of the information right, but other details were quite wrong. It’s a tragic backstory, showing how Kouta got into entertainment, as well as how he lost his mother and his female best friend. While the female best friend, who Kouta realized he was in love with, did indeed die tragically, her cause of death had nothing to do with him. But this is the baggage that Kouta is carrying with him, and it’s why he told Sahoko at the end of Volume One that there will never be a special person for him.

After Kouta returns home and catches the flu, Sahoko wants to help Kouta out. She goes to his place, bearing food as a delivery from her family’s restaurant as a cover. To be honest, I found this to be stalkerish behavior. At least we know Sahoko is aware that this can be seen as the actions of a stalker, but she goes ahead with her plan, anyway. Love can make people do stupid things, I guess. But it turns out that Kouta is sicker than he lets on, and he collapses while she’s there, and Sahoko takes in onto herself to care for him. While he’’ feverish and sick, he tells Sahoko the truth about his mother and his female friend, which is something he’s never really done before.

Even though Sahoko has heard the truth about his past, she still wants to be with Kouta and refuses to let him be alone. After that, though, he doesn’t respond to her texts. And during that time of silence, Sahoko has a mishap with her phone and gets a new one, which causes her to lose her contacts.

At the same time Sahoko has her phone mishap, Kouta is wrestling with his feelings for Sahoko. When he tries to text her back and finds her number is out of service, he starts seeing a parallel with what happened with his female friend in the past, and he realizes how he feels. I was actually a little surprised with the final panel in Volume Two, because I didn’t think we’d reach this point quite yet. But if we’ve made it to this plot point already, it’s making me think that My Special One is going to be a short manga series.

Volume Two is a strong continuation of Volume One, but I did notice something that nagged at me by the time I finished reading this volume. Sahoko’s best friend, Yuko, was nowhere to be seen. In some respects, this felt a little odd, since Yuko had an important role in the previous volume. Kouta may not be Yuko’s “bias” in Like Legends, but you’d think we would have gotten at least a brief scene of Yuko saying something to Sahoko about the scandal. Also, as Sahoko got closer to Kouta in this volume, I think it was a missed opportunity to not see Sahoko trying to hide this from Yuko. Even though Yuko may not be a major character in My Special One, her absence was still noticeable.

With this being a shojo manga, it wasn’t surprising to discover that Kouta had a tragic backstory to explain why he acts the way he does. Some of the plot beats, such as Sahoko discovering how sick Kouta truly was and taking care of him, are shojo tropes, but they did feel a little forced at times. But Sahoko and Kouta do develop more a chemistry with each other over the course of Volume Two, and I found myself shipping them by the end of it.

If you read and enjoyed the first volume of My Special One, then you’ll probably appreciate how the story continues in Volume Two.

The reviewer was provided a review copy by VIZ Media

Additional posts about My Special One:

Advertisement