The answer is that Taiga has severe abandonment issues: her father kicked her out of the house for not getting along with her step-mom and set her up in a luxury condominium with a large monthly stipend, and her natural mother wants nothing to do with her. And as with a tsundere, Takemiya slowly reveals that this attitude is armor that shields Taiga's soft, gooey interior, but she then proceeds to ask the question that other authors ignore - what sort of screwed up circumstances would lead a girl to act this way. All of which is typical tsundere behavior, and most authors would treat it as simply humorous. Even once they become friends, she continually refers to him as a 'dog' and slaps him around if he gets out of line.

A little later she nearly beats him to death in order to retrieve a love letter she stuck in his backpack by mistake. We first encounter her when she decks Ryuuji for simply bumping into her in the hallway.

But Yuyuko Takemiya isn't content to let her characters languish as stock figures, but instead uses the story as a psychological study to examine what such characters would be like in real life. Upon first introduction, everyone seems to fit into standard archetypes that should be familiar to anyone who's watched even a little anime: Ryuuji is the Ordinary High School Student Kitamura the Class Representative Taiga the tsundere Ami the Libby Minori the Cloudcuckoolander. There are lots of incidents along the way, most of them standard tropes for a Japanese school series (summer vacation, the class trip, the school festival).īut what elevates this series is the characters. Upon figuring this out, they decide to help each other out, but in the process end up falling in love with each other. The plot is a straight-forward rom-com set-up: Taiga and Ryuuji are high school students in love with the other's best friend. I opted for the latter, and while the translations are kinda rough in places ('Where's the delinquent Takasu!? Come and help us.') they're entirely readable, to the point that I managed to devour volumes 5 and 6 in a single day (roughly equivalent to reading a 500 page book in one sitting). (I've come to realize that reviewing all ten books of the Toradora! series would be way too much work, so I'm just going to do an overview of the entire series.)įirst, note that these novels haven't been licensed in the US, so you have only two options for reading them - (1) learn Japanese and import them from .jp, or (2) read the bootleg translations from Baka Tsuki.

Toradora light novel vol 1