Loved Daytime Shooting Star? Mika Yamamori’s Back With a Brand New Manga

It’s almost been a year already since the final chapter of Hirunaka no Ryuusei, known in English as Daytime Shooting Star, left the shoujo manga world sputtering in tears of joy (or grief, depending upon your OTP) and let’s be honest: we still haven’t fully recovered. How could you the way seafood-obsessed Suzume captured our hearts with her blunt naivete, or how we fell in love with coy, forbidden Shishio-sensei and poor flustered Mamura? That being said, it only seems natural to lose our minds over the fact that genius author Mika Yamamori is already back in action with her newest project, Tsubaki-Chou Lonely Planet. I mean, this is the same woman whose gorgeous style and sweet characters made Sugars, an otherwise run-of-the-mill series of high school one-shots, read like shoujo gold, not some small time author who would cave under the pressure of a wildly successful series early on in her career… right? So stop me if you’ve heard this one: we open with a brunette girl greeting the picture of her dead mother. Said girl, we discover, is actually homeless and must serve as a housekeeper to a slovenly, long-haired author. She slowly charms the resident tsundere with her determination and all around good nature. She’s threatened by a boy with two-colored hair at school. She has a name that other characters comment does not suit her. If you’re wondering if someone transforms into an animal in this manga (not yet), you’re on the right track.

Perhaps it’s a stretch to compare T…