Meme is the daughter of the Demon World’s Summoners Clan leader, and daddy has had enough of her lazy, lackadaisical ways! Off to Earth for her and she’d better toughen up as she learns how to strengthen her magic!
Except, Meme really does seem completely unprepared to leave home and it takes her mere pages to get wrapped up in a shady housing scheme put on by a rich boy who is “bored.” Will Meme and the reader be able to get out of this situation alive?!
Yen Press doesn’t publish nearly as many salacious series as some other manga publishers do, but Kuroyuri Apartments comes shrinkwrapped for good reason. There is no detailed nudity but there is a lot of simplified nudity of Meme, who looks to be about nine physically speaking, and it’s almost always played for humor at her expense. There’s no mention ever made of Meme’s age, beyond the fact that her father thinks that she’s old enough to be independent, so there is a chance that she might actually be close to as young as she looks.
Most of the humor in this first volume is rather cruel actually, and every single time it feels like you’re laughing at the characters, not with them. Besides Meme, each of the other tenants of the Kuroyuri Apartments we’ve seen so far (all women) are supposed to be a hilarious combination of opposites. For example, there’s a horny girl who is actually a virgin. There’s also a former bodyguard with a weakness for cute things (which borders on pedophilia). But instead of hilarious they come off as unappealing and boring. Really Sentarou, you say that you only allow people who entertain you to rent apartments from you and yet these are the current residents? It has been quite a while since I judged a fictional character so hard for their supposed sense of “humor” but there wasn’t a single “gag” in the 162 pages of this volume that I even giggled at, much less actually found funny.
Kuroyuri Apartments is complete in two volumes and I’m not surprised that the series ran out of steam so quickly. While there is nothing in volume 1 to suggest that this will be ending soon, frankly there’s just no hook for this series. There are plenty of ecchi titles published in English, plenty of stories involving demon summoning, and heck there are even plenty of stories about odd roommate situations! Nothing is new, the art is dull, and the characters are as flat as possible, so stay far away from this apartment complex!