Koibito wa Shugorei!?
My Lover is a Guardian Spirit!?

This early-90's manga is about a guardian spirit, Soou, who falls in love with a 20-year-old college student named Naoki. First Soou tries to reach her on the physical plane, and asks her to come with him (presumably to the astral plane, where he lives, but he's too lost in romantic fluff to tell her and she's too drunk to understand), but she throws a fit. So he pulls her through to the astral plane by force, but her guardian--Nusaka--yanks her away from him and reads him the riot act. So as a last resort, Soou follows the girl back to the physical plane to guard her close up and personal.

"Guarding her up close and personal" means living with her, and living with her means pitching in, so Soou and Nusaka don aprons and start cooking.

The art is excellent shoujo, with long strands of hair and loopy billows of kimono floating everywhere and Tokyo fantasy fashion on every page. (The picture of Soou in a hairband is a hoot. It's not supposed to be funny, though--and besides, why shouldn't men wear hairbands?) The men are whipped-cream and hot-fudge gorgeous. And everyone has a personality!--as far as I can tell. Soou is especially intriguing, with his manic-depressive swings between serious romance and high hilarity. Although I have nowhere near enough room to scan and translate the entire ten-tankoubon series, I'll be putting together a bishonen shrine and possibly a synopsis of the series.

Dramatis Personae | Stories | Summaries | The Many Faces of Soou | Where to Find More Koibito

Updates

7/10/02 - A new home! I ordered Oppo, the image book for Koibito, so the site will be getting a fabulous revamp soon. The character information needs a serious overhaul, too--as a fellow Koibito fan kindly pointed out, I've hopelessly confused Hikato and Hikato's evil twin, and I'm missing a few important facts about Naoki's "brother." *sigh*

Several people were emailing me from time to time about Koibito. The account y'all were mailing to wiped itself three times in quick succession, then the service closed completely, so I can't answer you. If you're still interested in Koibito, could you drop me a line?

9/9/01 - Even more pages of translations! Chapter 1, Volume 1 is now complete. The translations are getting sketchier as I go on because I'm slogging through a heavy section of spirit dialogue. I've joked before about how I can't understand such-and-such a character because they're speaking, um, classical Japanese, that's it--but now I'm dealing with characters who really are speaking classical Japanese. Gar. It's off to Sasuga tomorrow to find a book on classical Japanese, if such a thing exists in English. I'll be updating the translations as I go.

9/8/01 - A new section of chapter summaries! New pages and translations in the Stories section! Updated cast page, with the names of the characters actually filled in! Damn, I'm good!

5/4/01 - Site revamp time! I added a new section, put eleven pages from the beginning of the series in the story section, and added a few character portraits to Dramatis Personae.