MANGA TITLE: The Quintessential Quintuplets volume 1
STORY AND ART BY: Haruba Negi (春場ねぎ)
FIRST PUBLISHED IN JAPAN: Kodansha Ltd.
PUBLISHED IN USA BY: Kodansha Comics
RATED: T for Older Teen
RELEASE DATE: January 1, 2019
In 2017, “Gotobun no Hanayome” (5 equal brides) manga series was written and illustrated by Haruba Negi and serialized on Kodansha’s “Weekly Shonen Magazine.
With the manga series ongoing in Japan and seven graphic novels published, an anime series adaptation began in January 2019.
The manga series has also made its way to North America courtesy of Kodansha Comics.
The manga series begins with an introduction to the intelligent Uesugi Fuutarou. While bright, he has no mother, no friends and due to his father’s amazing debt, he and his younger sister Raiha have been living with hardly anything and often go hungry.
One day while eating lunch in the cafeteria, he and a female student try to fight over a seat. Both manage to sit down and when she sees a paper with his test score and that he got a perfect grade, she asks if he can tutor her. Not being a social person, he observes all the food she bought and tells her if she eats too much, she’ll get fat, thus upsetting her.
Meanwhile, Uesugi gets call from his younger sister and that their father found a part-time job and that a wealthy family moved to the area and their father recommended Uesugi to tutor their daughter. And Raiha with joy is happy that now they can finally fill their bellies.
Knowing how important it is to Raiha and also for him to have money to get food, he agrees to tutor this girl named Nakano Itsuki. Not knowing that the girl he argued with earlier, is Nakano.
Uesugi feels terrible because now that Nakano is in his class, he knows he needs to make things right with her. But when he wants to, she is always around these four other girls. When he goes to ask, these girls are trying to figure him out and he tries to figure out if they are her best friends that can help him make things right with her.
When he goes to meet Nakano at her home to tutor her, he is shocked to find out that the other girls were not her friends, in fact the five of them are quintuplets.
And to make things even more challenging, their father has given Uesugi the task of tutoring each of the five girls and making sure that they each graduate from high school.
Unfortunately, Uesugi learns that each of them have terrible grades and have no desire to study. But can Uesugi help the Nakano sisters? Get them to study and eventually graduate?
The main characters of the manga are:
- Uesugi Fuutarou – Excellent in school, has no social skills and always tries to find ways to spend less money as his family is poor due to his father’s debt.
- Uesugi Raiha – Fuutarou’s younger sister, she is the head of the family household and always wants to make sure the family eats, despite not having much money.
- Nakano Ichika – Has short hair and is more like the older sister. She is very messy and wants to become movie actress.
- Nakano Nino – Long hair, has a tsundere personality, is fashionable and great at cooking.
- Nakano Miku – Emotionless, shy, always wears headphones around her neck and she is an otaku for Japanese history.
- Nakano Yotsuba – Great at sports, very active but not very smart at all. Open to anything, especially when it comes to helping out Fuutarou.
- Nakano Itsuki – A bit naive, friendly with others except Fuutarou for frustrating and insulting her when they first met. She loves to eat and shop. She studies but doesn’t get good grades. When giving Uesugi a ride back home and visiting his family, she learns how poor the family is.
Reading “The Quintessential Quintuplets”, you can’t help but feel this will be harem-style manga series and I wouldn’t be surprised if each of the girls start to fall for the main protagonist when they see his good qualities.
While the concept of underachiever attracting beautiful women is nothing new to manga, it’s rather interesting because the series is about a guy using his brain in order to get the girls’ grades up.
Having a relationship is not really a priority because he lacks social skills and would’t know if a girl liked him or not, but what drives him is his younger sister not having to go hungry and he and his family not having to worry about putting food on their plate.
This is a job that he needs in order to make sure his sister and him don’t go hungry but of course, the challenge is that he has to teach quintuplets, each with different personalities and none of them like studying and each have bad grades.
The first few chapters introduce the characters but then we start to see Fuutarou trying to work on Miku first. Miku is hardcore into Japanese history, something that many people her age are not into. And she doesn’t feel Fuutarou would be able to help her because she knows a lot about it. But what if Fuutarou can find a way to prove to her that she needs him to tutor her?
And can he get the sisters to warm up to him, because right now, he’s having a tough time because they don’t like to study.
For those who enjoy harem stories or a story about an intelligent student taking on a paying job (which is important for his poor family) of tutoring quintuplets who are doing bad in school, don’t really like him or studying and must do all he can to make sure they graduate. A fun story and an entertaining first volume of Haruba Negi’s “The Quintessential Quintuplets”!
I guess we will see how the manga progresses but for the most part, I enjoyed the first volume and I look forward to reading vol. 2!