Reviews with content warning for Sexual harassment - Tokyo Ever After

The definition of a guilty pleasure. I hate-read the first half of this book, and then I started actually enjoying it. My rating lands somewhere in the middle as a result.

The issues that initially annoyed me: the way the author writes the MC and her friend group feels very "hello, fellow kids!" Izumi is supposedly born in 2003, so she's Gen Z like me, and it really felt while reading that the author is at least 10-15 years older than that. The references are very dated, and even the relationships between these friends feel like they were co-opted from a '90s or '00s Disney show or something. Izumi's friend group were not believably Gen Z at all, imo.

Also, Izumi was *really* annoying at the start. She gave off really strong "not like other girl" vibes, but in a way that specifically reminded me of when everyone got really annoyed at J. Law for constantly being irreverent because it felt like she was trying to hard. Izumi is constantly joking (as the narrator) about how she's so normal because she's a slob who doesn't care about school and can't be bothered to work hard or prepare for things. This leads to honestly really cringe and unlikable moments where she doesn't even read a dossier prepared for her so she can know what's going on when she's flown to Japan to meet her father and become a member of the royal family. Honestly, it stretched my suspension of disbelief quite a bit to think someone could be so careless, and it really felt like a parody of the "ignorant American" trope.

Which, by the way, was kind of Izumi's personality to start the novel. She seemed to have an almost pathological aversion to learning about Japanese culture, even though getting in touch with her Japanese heritage was supposedly the big impetus for her actually deciding to travel to Japan and meet her father. Her attitude was very much "I just want to do the fun stuff and not have to learn or change anything", which seriously drove me up the wall. This made it a bit jarring half-way through the novel when she abruptly had a change in attitude (one that did not feel foreshadowed or continuous at all to me, at least), and seemed to genuinely care about learning, even if she wasn't passionate about the topic, because she wanted to know about Japanese culture and succeed as a princess.

However jarring it was, I did actually start to like Izumi at that point, so that's a win. And finding her likable at that point is a big part of why I found the second half of the novel so much more enjoyable than the first, and I started really rooting for her and getting invested in the decisions she made. Her relationship with Akio was actually surprisingly cute (I liked their early banter and later love poems), and I felt like their relationship took up just the right amount of story time, being secondary to Izumi's self-growth and becoming comfortable in her role as a princess. I was also genuinely surprised by the twist near the end, but I feel like it served the story really well.

Also, Izumi's mother seems really cool. I almost want to read her story, lol.

So, some messy and conflicting opinions here, but if you're willing to overlook/work past some speed bumps early on, you very well may enjoy this Princess Diaries in Japan fairy tale!

Content Warnings