Review: Let's Eat Ramen and Other Doujinshi Short Stories

Let's Eat Ramen and Other Doujinshi Short Stories by Nagumo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars

Let’s Eat Ramen and Other Doujinshi Short Stories consisted of 4 stories: Let’s Eat Ramen (three parts), Plastic Blue, Urameshiiya, and You Make Me Dizzy (two parts).

Let’s Eat Ramen: ★★☆☆☆
It’s a story about a girl who likes to eat ramen. I guess it’s unique in that I’ve never read anything about as simple a topic as this before. It definitely wasn’t bad, but it’s hard to really like something with such little substance. It did succeed in giving me a craving for ramen at least. The art was okay, but it made all the characters look really young, which clashed with the big boobs and the one ass-shot.

Plastic Blue: ★★☆☆☆
This was definitely the story I liked the least. It was an extremely unoriginal, simple story, so much so that by just telling you the basics of what it was about, I would be saying the whole story. I didn’t hate it, but there wasn’t really anything (story-wise) to like either. The art was nice at least.

Urameshiiya: ★★★☆☆
Urameshiiya was an interesting story, and it actually had a plot! The main premise of the story was that the students at this school are afraid that there’s a ghost by the swimming pool, which is where our main character Hanako likes to garden. Because of this, Hanako gets into some trouble. It was fun to see the characters interact with each other, and I wanted to keep reading to see what would happen next. There were some pretty interesting plot developments, and this was just generally a pretty good story. That being said, there also wasn’t enough for it to be any more than just a good, three star story. The art was okay, but I did find myself thinking that it did look kind of juvenile at parts.

You Make Me Dizzy: ★★★☆☆
I quite liked You Make Me Dizzy. It felt unique to me in that I had never ever read or watched a character exactly like Shibahara. She’s extremely goofy, does not get embarrassed easily AT ALL, and she has never been able to finish a novel before. The latter is was really interested me. Whenever Shibahara tries to read a novel, a book without any pictures and only text, she has a lot of problems like forgetting what she has read as soon as she reads it, and losing the thread of the story. I can relate to this, because I sometimes have these problems as well. I just really appreciated having a character like this, because usually characters in manga/fiction in general are really smart, or they’re the dumb character everyone likes to make fun of. Instead of representing her whole personality, her reading disability is just one characteristic of her big personality.

All the characters in this short were a real joy to read about, especially Shibahara’s equally goofy friends. It’s a shame we didn’t get to see more of them, because they were really fun. Those are my feelings on the first part.

In the second part, Shibahara became the extremely rash stereotypical manga girl, and it was just not that great. Maybe an explanation would be that Shibahara is stupid, so of course she would do something like that. I wouldn’t like to think that, because just because you have trouble doing something, like reading, it does not make you stupid. This is why I gave this story three stars instead of four.

Also, the art was good!


As a collection, Let's Eat Ramen was good-ish, you know, not really fantastic or anything. I had a good time reading it, and it was really quick.


I downloaded a review copy of this from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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