The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Is the Order a Rabbit?

What's It About? 

Lured in by the promise of cute bunnies, Cocoa stops by Rabbit House Café for a drink―only to find out it's the very place she'll be living…?! Inside, she meets small-but-aloof Chino, militaristic Rize, calm, traditional Chiyo, and Sharo, a normal girl who overflows with elegance. Watch the girls' friendship deepen as the café bursts with cuteness and laughter from all directions!

Is the order a rabbit? has a story and art by Koi, with an English translation by Giuseppe di Martino. This volume was retouched and lettered by Rebecca Sze. Published by Yen Press (October 15, 2024.)

Is It Worth Reading?

My only context for Is the order a rabbit? is that its anime utterly dominated the zeitgeist in 2014 and that its theme song in D4DJ Groovy Mix is pretty cute. Taking so long to get a domestic release of its source manga might give you an idea of how brief a flash in the pan was for this series. Still, if you're still hanging on as one of the GochiUsa die-hards, your girls are finally here. For anybody else who never caught the anime and maybe wondered what the big deal was, I don't know that I can fairly say I get it after this first volume.

I've got no problem with 4koma comedies, cute-girls-doing-cute-things slice-of-life, or even material in the mighty Manga Time Kirara manner. And if GochiUsa lacks the punch of something like, say, Bocchi the Rock!, that's by design. This is a very fluffy, easygoing little series, where the main reasons for it to exist are the surprisingly consistently detailed backgrounds of timberwork houses and the cute designs of the school and cafe uniforms (plus irregular illustrations of the girls in various states of undress). It is technically a comedy and one that even got me to snort a few times. It's a very "sensible chuckle" and those chill vibes meant it never really reached for annoying in its efforts. Cloying, maybe, but that's what the target audience comes here for.

The biggest issue with GochiUsa is that it's too good at cozymaxing. It's one of those manga where it's way too easy as a reader to fall into The Slice-Of-Life Fugue State, where you just sort of zone out scanning over panels until you snap back to reality and realize you haven't absorbed any of the antics on-page. The manga tries to keep your attention occasionally, with odd askew details like Rize brandishing a gun a couple of times or the deep lore that Chino's pet rabbit (more or less) is her reincarnated grandfather. But GochiUsa can't go wild with those bits, its energy would never hold out. I don't begrudge this manga for doing its specific thing in as perfectly cromulent a manner as dozens of its peers, but I'll admit there's just a hint of incredulity given the broader context. This was your smash, runaway hit of 2014? I'm too sleepy from reading this manga to go back and check, so I'm just going to assume hardly anything else came out that year.

If there's anything I remember from journalism school it's this: if a title ends in a question mark, the answer is always “no.” No, it is not wrong to pick up girls in a dungeon. And no, it turns out, the order is not a rabbit. If this cute girls doing cute things manga feels a bit dated, you won't be surprised to learn that it was originally published in 2012. It was licensed by the now-defunct Sol Press and out of print until now when Yen Press came in clutch with a license rescue. After 12 years of languishing, is this relic of the moe blob era still worth reading? This low-key 4-panel comedy has fans, but it feels more dated than classic a decade past its prime. About a handful of gags gave me a sensible chuckle, the rest were mostly forgettable.

The thing that kept me going through this slice-of-life story set in a cafè was a joke fan theory that Is the order a rabbit? takes place in an alternate universe where Japan won WWII. That could explain the quasi-European town and Budapest-like “chess bathhouse” that the girls visit. Of course, the reason for these things is much simpler; in the author's note, Koi (a pseudonym for two people who collaborate on art and writing) says they wanted to draw a comic about a café in a European-looking town. The rest of the story is similarly nonsensical and peppered with details not for story reasons, but presumably to appeal to the authors' eclectic interests; for example, a high school girl who open-carries for no reason. There's also the plot point that the owner of the café has been transformed into a rabbit (more like is the OWNER a rabbit, haha), and the story refuses to elaborate (in this volume, at least). Against this surreal backdrop, five adorable girls work at their respective cafés, have a sleepover, and don their most ruffled bathing suits. I'd be a little more comfortable with that last part if one of the girls was not 13. The jokes come from clashes between the girls' differing moe archetypes (tsundere, kuudere, airhead, older sister type, easily-flustered type) and we've seen these dynamics play out countless times before.

Is the order a rabbit? was once popular enough to get a 12-episode anime in 2014. However, it does not seem that much care was taken with this latest publication. For example, Syaro/Sharo's name is spelled differently in the book and the Yen Press announcement about it—was there once an intent to change it to the version used in the Crunchyroll subtitles? I hope this manga finds its way into the hands of fans who didn't get the chance to acquire it before it went out of print. Now that it has been so long, the material feels dated and unlikely to pique the interest of new readers.