For most of the manga, the focus is on four main characters:
- Takashi: The aforementioned student, who is living alone until the start of the story, until his sister (and his sister's female lover) move in with him.
- Mafuyu: Takashi's sister, a high school student experimenting with sex and love for the first time.
- Sae: Mafuyu's bisexual girlfriend, who has dropped out of high school and is chasing her lover.
- Mariko: A girl with a crush on Takashi who is about to make her move on him.
Then over the last third of the manga, it evolves to focusing mostly on Takashi and his troubles--although none of the other characters are completely dropped, they fade a bit into the background.
Most of the manga is about infidelity and maturity. I appreciated that the characters make choices about love, and aren't simply blown around by their feelings. They choose to get close to people (often when they shouldn't), and then choose who they want to be with (sometimes wisely, sometimes not so much). And over the course of the manga, you can see Takashi's choices improving.
I also liked the artwork. The characters and backgrounds are well drawn and consistent. There is a LOT of sex, but the sex usually is drawn in ways that tell you something about the two people having sex, and isn't only there for titillation.
I did have two problems with the manga, however. First, I didn't find the actions of the characters always very believable--particularly the girls. Sometimes it felt like they were acting in some way because that's how the plot needed them to act in order to prolong the melodrama, and didn't feel natural or seem like it flowed out of that character's personality.
In part as a result of this, the middle third of the manga dragged. One storyline in particular had a very predictable outcome, and yet the author drug it out for almost two volumes. That section of the manga was, frankly, a bit hard to read; twice I almost dropped it.
Finally, the ending of the manga was fine, but felt very rushed--especially compared to how methodical the rest of the story had been. I liked the ending, in terms of the pairings happened that I wanted to happen... but at least one of them felt poorly developed.
The end result is that Haru yo, Koi is a pretty good manga that could have (should have?) been much better than it is. It's certainly a solid Seinen Romantic Drama, and if you like that genre then you should certainly read this one. But I felt like it had the opportunity to become a truly great romance... it just couldn't quite pull it off.
