Blue Box Review

Taiki Inomata gets up at five to practise badminton because Chinatsu Kano, a year above him and already a national-level basketball player, trains in the same gym at the same hour. Then her parents move abroad and she moves into his spare room. Miura sets that up inside a chapter and then, unusually for the premise, does almost nothing cheap with it: living together produces awkwardness and laundry rather than accidents, and both of them keep training.

That restraint is the series' real argument. Sport is not a backdrop here, it is the thing the romance has to fit around. Taiki improves at a believable rate, Chinatsu is allowed a bad season, and the emotional beats land during matches because the matches were drawn properly first. Miura's pages are clean and airy, with a good eye for body language and a restrained hand on screentone.

Hina Chono is why people still argue about it. The childhood friend who encourages his pursuit of somebody else and then confesses anyway is given more interior life than the plot can pay off, and the middle volumes circle her longer than they should. Serialisation closed in July 2026 at chapter 250, and the twenty-eighth and final volume lands in December. Warm, patient, and roughly four volumes too long.