Is Akanabe-sensei wa Tereshirazu Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manga, 5 volumes
Run	2023–present · ongoing
Community score	AniList 7.2 · MangaUpdates 7.0

Overview

Akanabe-sensei wa Tereshirazu (roughly, 'Akanabe-sensei Doesn't Know Embarrassment') is a Japanese manga by Naoya Tajimi, serialized in Jump SQ since 2023. Kouki Sakieda works as an assistant to Akira Akanabe, the manga artist he's admired for years -- and somewhere along the way, that admiration turned into something more. The catch is that Akanabe already knows exactly how she feels about him, and she's not shy about saying so, constantly and loudly. The series follows Kouki trying to keep his composure at work while his boss showers him with unfiltered praise and affection.

What it does well

The series gets a lot of mileage out of simply swapping which half of the couple gets to be bashful. Most workplace and school rom-coms put the heroine in the flustered, will-she-won't-she position while the male lead stays composed; here it's reversed, with Akanabe fully aware of and vocal about her feelings while Kouki is the one scrambling to process his own. That swap alone keeps familiar rom-com beats feeling a little different scene to scene.

The manga studio setting also does real work. Instead of a generic classroom or office, the day-to-day rhythms of assisting a working mangaka -- deadlines, panel work, the specific pressure of the job -- give the comedy a grounded, specific backdrop rather than a backdrop that could be swapped out for any other workplace.

And because the story doesn't spend chapters building toward a will-they-won't-they confession, the comedy gets to focus on the relationship as it develops rather than stalling on the reveal. That's a different kind of pacing than a lot of rom-coms attempt, and it mostly pays off here.

Where it falls short

The manga-industry workplace romance is a fairly well-populated shelf at this point, and beyond the flipped shy/confident dynamic, the series doesn't do a great deal in its opening chapters to distinguish itself further from other entries in the genre.

It also has no official English license as of this review, so readers outside Japan are stuck with scanlation and aggregator sites rather than a simultaneous-release platform with a predictable schedule.

Verdict

Akanabe-sensei wa Tereshirazu takes a familiar workplace rom-com shape and gets real comedic mileage out of reversing who gets to be embarrassed. It's not reinventing the genre, but the specific chemistry between a confidently affectionate mangaka and her flustered assistant makes it an easy, enjoyable read.