Tags
1990s, Better than Twilight, Bisco Hatori, Comedy, high school students, Manga, Millennium Snow, Paranormal Romance, Shojo, Teen lit, vampires, werewolves
By Bisco Hatori
“Seventeen-year-old Chiyuki Matsuoka was born with heart problems, and her doctors say she won’t live to see the next snow. Toya is an 18-year-old vampire who hates blood and refuses to make the traditional partnership with a human, whose life-giving blood would keep them both alive for a thousand years.
Chiyuki makes the most of the time she has left, even though things aren’t that exciting–until she comes across a reluctant vampire late one chilly night. Can Chiyuki teach Touya to feel a passion for life, even as her own is ending?” (Volume 1 description via Good Reads)
Published: 1998 (original Japanese), 2004 (English translation)
Read and Reviewed: July 2018
I picked up these two volumes of manga from my local used book store because I recognized the author’s name. As other Anime/Manga fans might know, this short series is written by Bisco Hatori, the mangka who also brought us Ouran High School Host Club. Millennium Snow was a short paranormal romance/comedy that she wrote before her most popular series.
Essentially, this is a better written manga version of Twilight. There’s a vampire, Toya, who is a character who guards his emotions behind a temper and a werewolf, Satsuki, who is upbeat and popular among his human classmates who know nothing of his supernatural secret. Chiyuki is a pretty typical shojo heroine, but with serious health problems which threaten her life. There are also many comical elements in this manga which is very much Hatori’s style, reminiscent at points of Host Club (though this series is older, I read Host Club first).
One complaint that I saw on Goodreads and agreed with was that the pacing of the first volume is incredibly odd. It reads much more as the middle of a series rather than a beginning. I felt like I had skipped volume 1 and gone to volume 3 or 4 without any context. The main reason I felt this way was that, Chiyuki was already offering her blood to Toya despite the fact they just met and he is incredibly rude to her. Their relationship didn’t really make any sense to me until volume 2, honestly, since they had time to know each other.
Similar to when I read Twilight (in high school to see what the big deal was, since it was like the biggest thing then), I preferred the werewolf to the vampire; Edward seemed boring and Toya was a jerk vs. Jacob who seemed decent until the end (yikes) and Satsuki seems genuinely sweet, if not a little stupid (he got the most laughs out of me, to his credit, and I have reason to believe that he was an earlier version of Ouran‘s Tamaki since their personalities are somewhat similar in their ridiculousness). However, its obvious that Chiyuki is going to end up with Toya, since the whole theme of the story is about her wanting to live as long as she can so she can see as many winters’ snows as her health will allow. Toya is the only one who has the power to save her life; if he bites her, they’ll live 1,000 years together as vampires. So sorry, Satsuki, looks like you won’t likely win in this story either.
There is also a rather awkward story at the end of volume 2 where Toya has to save Chiyuki from her obsessive cousin, Kei who has had a crush on her since their childhood. Kei even went to America to become a heart doctor to fix Chiyuki’s condition. While those intentions are noble, he goes off the rails with jealousy when he sees Toya and Chiyuki together. Then he finds out that Toya is a vampire and he kidnaps Chiyuki “for her own good”. Fortunately, Toya is able to save her but I found that whole storyline really bizarre and just weird, not really funny. It also fell into the annoying shojo trope where all of the young male characters must find the heroine attractive and be in love with her even if it doesn’t make any sense at all. Toya and Satsuki are Chiyuki’s age, high school boys; their crushes on her make sense for the story, but Kei, who is introduced as an “older brother like” cousin shouldn’t have had a romance plot with Chiyuki- it was just entirely inappropriate.
My rating for these two books is 3.5 stars! Even with the Kei plot and the awkwardly paced beginning of the series, I found this series better than Twilight. Bisco Hatori is a true comedian and her unique style of comedy will delight readers. I would suggest this book for those who like manga, paranormal romance, vampires, werewolves, off-beat comedy, fans of Twilight or Ouran High School Host Club.
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