Synopsis
Aya is a high school girl with strong opinions about music — the good kind, the vinyl kind, the obscure-record-store-find kind. She's developed a serious crush on an employee at her favorite local music shop: mysterious, stylish, with the kind of effortless cool that only belongs to someone who has genuinely listened to a lot of music with real attention. She confesses. The employee reacts oddly. It takes another moment for Aya to realize: the person she confessed to is in her class. And the mystery of what she's actually discovered about this person is more interesting than the confession itself. The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't a Guy at All (Ki ni Natteru Hito ga Otoko ja Nakatta) is a compact, beautifully observed girls' love romance published in Monthly Melody. It is gentle, sharply funny, and built on a reveal that changes the shape of everything that follows.