Disclaimer: Minor spoilers ahead. Please read at your own discretion.
There’s something so beautiful about a love story you know will end in tragedy.
That was the only thought I had after I finished reading Kimi to Tsuzuru Utakata, otherwise known as The Summer You Were There. A friend told me about the manga, warning me that it was a tragedy. Naturally, me being me, I wanted to read it for myself so I could get emotionally destroyed.
And, oh.
Kimi to Tsuzuru Utakata began serialization in 2020 in Comic Yuri Hime, a magazine for yuri (WLW) manga, and only just finished in January 2024. It was written fully by an author known online as Yuama, who’s also written other yuri manga. The synopsis is as follows: “Shizuku Hoshikawa, a high schooler and loner, secretly writes a novel. When it is nearly summer break, it is read by Kaori Asaka, a popular figure in their class. Though Shizuku was prepared for harsh criticism, Kaori praises it highly and expects her to write her next work, a romance novel about the two of them. Shizuku refuses, but Kaori asks for a date if she will not write it.”
At first glance, it doesn’t seem like much other than a cute romance manga—but as I mentioned, it’s a tragedy. A romantic tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless.
The opening page of Kimi to Tsuzuru Utakata features a girl typing on a laptop, a photo of two girls together, a plush of an axolotl, and a letter. The caption reads “The summer you were there” and “I…” before moving into the beginning of the story. Each piece of what’s in the beginning is seen again throughout the story, some in more innocent roles than others. The girl writing is Shizuku, our main character, typing a story she handwrote. The contents of that story, I’ll leave you to find out when you read the manga for yourselves.
The difference in Shizuku and Kaori’s expressions in the photograph of the two of them is part of what immediately hooked me. I love a good pairing where the characters are not quite opposites of each other, but have complementary personalities. Even something as simple as a photograph—an illustrated one, at that—showcases that on the very first page, before we officially meet either character. The colored layout is alluring, bright but calm, with simple enough captions to entice the reader into turning the page.
The majority of the events take place over the course of summer break in Japan, which is around 40 days, much shorter than in America. Hence the translation of the title: The Summer You Were There. With this time frame in place for the story, over 32 total chapters, one would expect the story beats to be rushed; however, this isn’t the case. Time flows almost naturally between the chapters, regardless of the length of each. The main driving force for the tragedy portion isn’t revealed until about halfway through the manga, during the fifteenth chapter.
If at that point, readers didn’t have an idea that there was tragedy ahead, they would begin to have an inkling there.
I had the unique experience of going in knowing it would end in tragedy. Because of that, I appreciated the small moments that Shizuku and Kaori had with each other from the get-go, becoming enveloped in their growing friendship and feelings for each other. How much they wanted to spend their time together over the summer. All of the emotional beats hit, and some of them hit so hard, despite me already knowing the inevitability of tragedy.
The final chapter was released about a week after I read the first 31—the release date being literal days ago—and I read it the instant I knew it existed. Even now, days after reading it, I keep thinking about it. This is the kind of story that stays in your mind for a long time after. Everything about it: Shizuku and Kaori’s dynamics and relationship, what happened during that summer, what happened in their pasts that led to their story being told in the first place.
Even knowing how it would end, I fell in love with the story being told. There are so few characters apart from Shizuku and Kaori, limited to their families and two other friends, but even they are fleshed out in the time they have on the page. Every character has a reason for being there; every event has a reason for happening.
If I may get a little personal in this review: it takes a lot for me to cry at books. I can count on one hand how many books I’ve cried at while reading. I was fully prepared for the outcome of this one, unlike the others, but I still found myself sobbing on my couch with my dog sleeping beside me. And that was just at the penultimate chapter.
I am so glad I decided to read this manga, and I highly recommend giving it a read if you’re alright with romantic tragedies. My official rating of this manga is a full five stars—this honestly breaks the scale.
Yuama, you are a romantic tragedy genius.