There are various structural similarities between many of the iterations of the teen-humor comics-genre both in America and Japan. Obviously, whenever a series focused on high-school teens is meant to continue indefinitely, the teens will remain frozen in time, eternally youthful and without the possibility of matriculation or maturation. One may find intimations of adult life in various stories written both for ARCHIE and for URUSEI YATSURA, but the characters will never exist outside the high school microcosm. They will take infinite numbers of tests, play an infinite numbers of sports games, and ceaselessly play pranks on teachers and make romantic hookups, and nothing more. High school is almost a variation of the Greek realm of Hades, where those sentenced to abide therein must repeat the same actions ceaselessly.
However, Japanese publishers are far more renowned than their American counterparts for teen-humor serials which come to a definite end. This doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that the high school microcosm will always be treated any more realistically. I’ve no direct experience of the “light novel” series REAL BOUT HIGH SCHOOL, but judging from the 1998-2001 manga adaptation, the titular school, where students fight one another in extravagant martial matches, has nearly nothing to do with the way a real high school functions. The school is simply there as an excuse to bring together an assortment of same-age teens for the purpose of romance and slapstick hijinks. A variation on the theme appears in Ken Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA. Some of the characters still go to high school while others live as “ronins,” would-be collegians striving to ace their entrance exams. But school is just the place where the principals go to take their tests, and all the romance and slapstick ensues at the dormitory shared by the hero and his harem of nubile love-interests. Unlike REAL BOUT, LOVE HINA does conclude with all of the characters matriculating and advancing to the next phases of adult life.
NISEKOI, translated as “false love,” follows the overall arc of LOVE HINA in that high school has a definite end, the action of the series taking place over four years. Most of the escapades do take place at the school, where tests and teachers take a back seat to romance and slapstick, though several plot-threads also involve the home life of either the two main characters, Raku Ichijo and Chitoge Kirisaki, or of members of the subordinate ensemble. Indeed, though Raku and Chitoge first become aware of one another at school, their respective families force them into sustained propinquity. Raku is the offspring of a well-to-do Yakuza family, though the teen has no intention of becoming a gangster, while Chitoge is the scion of an American crime-combine, the Beehive, which comes to Japan to conduct business. In a reversal of the main plot of ROMEO AND JULIET, the two adolescents must pretend to date one another in order to soothe tensions between the rival gangs—sort of a high-schooler version of political marriages designed to create international alliances.
Author Naoshi Komi makes a handful of direct references to The Shakespeare Play That Launched Several Thousand High School Renditions. However, if Raku and Chitoge resemble any Bard-characters, they would be the incessantly quarreling Beatrice and Benedick of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. Yet in NISEKOI "Benedick" is just an average guy with a streak of righteousness, while "Beatrice" is a short-tempered, half-Japanese half-American tsundere chick with the habit of punching out anyone who pisses her off. Raku takes the brunt of most of Chitoge’s temper tantrums, which sometimes makes the “false love” imposture hard to sell. However, after the first year Komi largely drops the plotline of the rival gangs, though Claude, one of Chitoge’s guardians, plays a significant role throughout the narrative. Far more important to the story is that five other young women also begin pursuing Raku with varying degrees of intensity, and one of them is Kosaki, a girl whom Raku has loved since middle school. Kosaki reciprocates Raku's feelings, but neither has been courageous enough to confess their feelings. Of course, none of these rivalries would really matter emotionally if Raku and Chitoge’s feelings for one another were entirely false.
The other seekers of Raku’s affections are intentionally more over-the-top, which in many respects makes them less credible in the competition. Tsugumi is Chitoge’s martially skilled bodyguard, who dresses as a boy but has tortured feelings for Raku and fears to upset her cherished mistress. Haru, sister to Kosaki, isn’t much of a rival either, since she knows of her sibling’s feeling for Raku and thus never confesses that she too finds Raku appealing. Yui, though no relation to Raku, spends a lot of time at Raku’s house when both are children, and though she desires him he can only think of Yui as a sister. The only girl who comes close to rivaling with Chitoge and Kosaki is Marika, the daughter of the local police chief (who’s well acquainted with the activities of both criminal gangs). Marika is as given to obstreperous behavior as Chitoge, but she can express her feelings for Raku openly, while Chitoge is far more ambivalent. These tangled relationships become even more involved when the characters learn that all seven of them crossed paths as small children, and that most of them forgot their shared past after being separated. Komi uses an artful Dickensiasn device to keep this subplot percolating, though the backstory never overpowers the primary consideration: that Raku, even if he likes having a harem on some level, can’t keep both Betty and Veronica.
Far more than eros, NISEKOI celebrates the bonds of friendship. Granted, it’s an idealized friendship, one so intense that even rivals like Chitoge and Marika will go to the wall for one another. There’s a mature tone to the adolescents’ discussions of love, even though there’s still plenty of Takashashi-style absurdity to keep things lively, ranging from guardians using ninja-style weapons to a super-chemical designed to force Raku into playing Prince Charming by kissing all of his would-be paramours in their sleep. In the final analysis, NISEKOI is strongest in terms of the dramatic potentiality, though one particular sequence deserves separate consideration as a mythcomic.
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