Gaba Kawa

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Gaba Kawa is the story of a young demon girl’s search for love. Rara, sent to Earth to cause nothing but mischief, finds herself falling in love with a hot human boy. So begins her wacky attempts to worm her way into Retsu Aku’s heart.

This would be your normal romantic comedy except for one very important factor: whenever demons use their powers to help humans, they lose that power. Lose enough and the demon will disappear entirely! This brings up a question that every true shojo heroine must answer for herself: Is true love worth dying for?

Overall, I really liked this book. The characters were ... cute and entertaining. While it sometimes strayed from total believability (come on, it’s a story about a love-struck demon!) I’m glad I bought it, and I plan to check out more from Rie Takada. If not for one small problem, I’d slap 5 stars on this baby and call it a day.

Since this is a one-volume series, the main question for me was: does it end well? Too often do I see short series scramble to wrap up everything in the last chapter. Unfortunately, Gaba Kawa falls victim to this. Instead of being a fitting conclusion to a funny series, it seems rushed and not very thought out. Gaba Kawa is a manga that just misses being “Great” and is instead regulated to merely “Good”.

If you’re in the mood for a quick read with cute characters, this is the one for you.

If you’re in the mood for something that you’ll want to read again and again… look elsewhere, my friend.

Gaba Kawa is a story about a magical girl coming to earth to cause mischief, but instead wants to help a human guy instead. She's determined to have the guy fall in love with her by her own means, not through magic.

The story's pretty typical, at least the twist is if she uses her magic to help humans she can lose her power. So, she has to decide between love or self-perseverance. The art is nicely drawn, but nothing out of the ordinary for a shoujo.

It was a good short manga that was enjoyable. Overall, nothing extraordinary.

The story has too many tropes that feel like cheap devices to move the plot forward. For example, the two demons are called Bibi and Rara. Why would any demon be called cutie-patootie names when they're supposed to play pranks on people and do mischievous stuff in the story? And why do they look cute or look like any other typical human when they're supposed to not be humans? Rara said Aku is a really handsome demon when she never even saw how Aku looked like. Why? Why would anyone think someone looks amazing when they didn't even know what the real character looks like? ... And the real Aku is this freakishly ugly character. I don't understand it. And a lot of Rara's powers are there to move the plot forward or to fill in any plot holes that the author doesn't even know how to continue to write anymore. It's like, when Rara saved the fake-Aku by letting him float, that feels like the author wrote herself into a dead end and needs something cheap to twist things back on track. The author said Rara will face certain doom, be banished, or lose all her powers if she doesn't do mischief and play pranks on people, but the stakes weren't established in the story well enough that any reader would care about it.