Mononoke Sharing [Review]

Jason Bradley Thompson July 8, 2018

Mononoke Sharing manga

Yata, a high schooler, shares her house with five unusual roommates. “The rent is super cheap, but there’s one problem … my five roommates are literally monsters. That, and they all have huge boobs.”

It’s all true! Mizuchi, the oldest and most mature of the bunch, is a college-age kappa who looks normal except for the plates she occasionally grows from her head. Momi is a horned devil. Yooko is an oversexed fox spirit who speaks with a Southern accent and sleeps with men, women, and ghosts, bothering Yata with all the sex noises coming from her room. Kuro, the weirdo of the bunch, is a long-necked rokurokubi who mostly stays indoors, sending her head out on necessary errands. Lastly, there’s Yuki, the shy snow woman who has a secret crush on one of her housemates. And yes, there are tons of breast jokes, although the art goes for mellow and cartoony rather than leering and photorealistic.

Mononoke Sharing manga A short (132-page) book of vignettes by the creator of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, Mononoke Sharing similarly mixes slice-of-life hijinks with monster girls (no dragons this time, although Momi’s weird horns look more dragonlike than demonic). The humor is hit and miss, from the crude (jokes about used condoms) to the totally untranslatable (jokes about Japanese manzai stand-up comedy) to the occasionally entertaining.

Tying it together is a faint message about prejudice and fellow outcasts making friends; the monsters quickly realize Yata is rather lonely and doesn’t have many human companions, while Yata is initially afraid of monsters but warms to them as she decides that everyone has something that sets them apart from others, such as her own “mean-looking eyes.” Ultimately, though, like the characters themselves who exist between the monster and human worlds, this manga hovers in a kind of bland netherworld where it’s neither very funny nor sexy nor sweet, and the thing that jumps out most is the endearingly bad way Coolkyousinnja draws their house.

publisher: Seven Seas
story and art: Co0lkyousinnjya
rating: 16+

This story appears in the August 2018 issue of Otaku USA Magazine. Click here to get a print copy.