The Spring 2023 Manga Guide

My Wife is an Oni

What's It About? 

Tomoyuki's wife is an Oni. And by that, he means it quite literally -- his wife, Mitsuki, IS a bona-fide Oni from the countryside. But although Mitsuki tends to be a bit harsh, she has a sensitive side that only wishes to express to Tomoyuki just how much she loves her. "My Wife Is an Oni" is a charming slice-of-life that looks at the daily lives of a young Tokyoite married to his tsundere Oni-wife!

My Wife Is an Oni has a story and art by Yamato Nadeshiko, with English translation by Ed Ayes. This volume was retouched and lettered by Firadi Pramana. The series is released physically and digitally by Irodori Comics.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

My Wife Is an Oni is, simply put, adorable. Tomoyuki and Mitsuki met as kids at a shrine, and now years later, they're a happy couple, still madly in love and just being generally cute about it. This is especially good if you like your ladies tsundere, because Mitsuki is very much that – the disconnect between what she says to Tomoyuki and what she thinks is an almost classic depiction of the character type. It makes sense given her species, but it would have been just as easy to make her a yandere, which would have detracted quite a bit from the overall charm. In the second issue, Tomoyuki inverts the Setsubun ritual so that rather than chasing oni out, he's welcoming his wife in, and that speaks volumes as to why creator Yamato Nadeshiko opted for one trope over the other: just like people, there are good oni and bad oni, and Tomoyuki wants to assure his wife that she's the former during a difficult time of year.

That Mitsuki would be uncomfortable during Setsubun speaks to the level of thought that has gone into this story. It would have been just as easy to ignore the holiday and its attendant ritual even with the inclusion of Christmas and New Year's, especially since we haven't seen any other mythological creatures in the story. Instead, the inclusion of it and Mitsuki's discomfort with it adds to the level of care between husband and wife, while also continuing the world-building established when Mitsuki says that she doesn't eat peaches for religious reasons. (She then hands Tomoyuki a copy of Momotaro.) There's a nice balance between gags and charm that makes this very readable.

It may annoy readers that much of the time the couple doesn't quite act the way we assume a married pair to be. They're really shy around each other in a lot of ways, and Tomoyuki is uncomfortable with Mitsuki walking around in her towel after a bath. There isn't even any kissing, so this feels more like two kids playing at being married, with the husband going off to work and the wife staying home and cooking. But despite that, this really is a sweet little story with nice, cleanly drawn art (and one important image in color in the middle of the second issue, which is neat) that should make anyone looking for something light and fluffy happy.

Christopher Farris

Rating:

Officially translating and publishing doujinshi is a noble enough pursuit, and with that in mind here we have Irodori Aqua's release of the first couple of short volumes of My Wife Is an Oni. Between that title and its author actually operating under the handle "Yamato Nadeshiko", you can probably already guess the sort of thing you're getting here. It's all cutesy couple antics and fluffy domestic bliss, with the twist being that the wife is a tall, perpetually tsundere-angry oni lady. For many, this is the dream.

The opening entries in this comic are about as one-note as you might expect. It's all comically cutesy interactions between this hot oni and her cute little manlet of a husband as they affectionately spar verbally before flipping around to thinking/declaring just how much they love each other. It's not really looking to subvert or interrogate these sincere wife-guy antics; Mr. Boop this ain't.

But hey, My Wife Is an Oni is perfectly effective at the one thing it's setting out to do. You've got scenes of Oni Wife using her incredible strength to hand-juice an apple and provoke GodIWishThatWereMe.jpg reactions from readers. And there's something quite charming about this translation's choice to render Oni Wife's dialect as an outlandish cockney accent. Seeing her go "I'm such a melon!" repeatedly really drives up that gap-moe cute factor. The second volume also dips into depictions of how real-life oni might feel about modern deployments of Japanese folklore and traditions, culminating in a sweet little story set around Setsubun. This is the fluff of the highest order, but as a cute way to kill a few minutes, you could do way worse.

Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

My Wife Is an Oni is a cute collection of stories featuring a meek little man and his tall oni-wife. There isn't terribly much in the way of depth to these stories: Mitsuki is aggressive and tsundere, and her husband is a puppy of a man who's crazy about his giant strong wife. There are a few cute stories that play around with Mitsuki being an oni, like her hatred of peaches and setsubun “for religious reasons” or her inhuman snoring, but otherwise, it's just a guy and his beefy wife.

The artwork is cute, if a bit simple, but it's charming to see Tomoyuki and Mitsuki all lovey-dovey with each other, even if Tomoyuki honestly looks more like a child than anything else. Nevertheless, these are some cute warm-and-fluffy stories that are a pretty good recommendation for anyone who likes monster girls.

MrAJCosplay

Rating:
The story is cute but that's really all it has going for it. My Wife Is an Oni is just a very simple episodic series about a young short adult living with his Oni wife who is a massive tsundere…and that's it. There's nothing about world-building and there is nothing about the circumstances that led to these people finding each other. There is some hint of Oni prejudice towards the end of volume two but that really just comes down to a misunderstanding about holiday customs. Every chapter is barely two to five pages long and pretty much repeats the same cycle of our short husband doing something or not doing something that his wife misunderstands, Then she threatens him about it only for him to have actually done something that makes her happy and all is good in the end.

It never feels like the relationship is in any real danger but it's incredibly shallow. This might just be a me-thing, but the tsundere trope works in an adolescent setting, not an adult one. The antics and humor feel very juvenile even if it can be sweet at times but that tone sometimes clashes with the overall setup. I don't know how long these two have been married or the circumstances of how they got together but I don't understand why this humor should work with a married couple. If the Oni wife genuinely does not trust her husband which is the premise of almost every joke, then I question why they even got married in the first place. I didn't really gain a lot from reading these two volumes, I doubt I would gain much from continuing the series and I doubt you guys would be missing a lot if you skipped it.