Is I Have a Crush at Work Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

I Have a Crush at Work sets up its whole premise in the title: Masugu Tateishi and Yui Mitsuya, two coworkers at a confectionery company known around the office as bitter rivals, are actually dating in secret, and most of the manga's fifteen volumes are built around the comedy of keeping that hidden from everyone around them. It's a simple hook, but Akamaru Enomoto gets a surprising amount of mileage out of it.

What it does well

The core joke, that the office's most notorious enemies can't keep their hands off each other, works because the bickering between Masugu and Yui feels specific rather than generic. Their rivalry has real history and real personality quirks behind it, so the gap between how they act in public and how they act alone reads as funny rather than like a flimsy excuse for romantic tension. Enomoto's comic timing is genuinely sharp — jokes land cleanly panel to panel without over-explaining themselves, which keeps even repetitive setups feeling snappy.

The workplace setting does real work too. Because Masugu and Yui's coworkers all buy into the mortal-enemies bit, every near-miss and close call carries actual social stakes, and the manga is smart about mining that tension for comedy rather than manufactured drama. It's a genre that lives or dies on chemistry, and this couple has it in spades — their dynamic stays entertaining across the whole run instead of curdling into repetition the way a lot of long-running rom-coms do.

Where it falls short

The flip side of staying breezy is that the stakes never really escalate. Readers looking for real conflict, emotional complications, or growth beyond whether the couple gets caught this time will find the series stays fairly shallow by design. A number of the will-they-won't-get-caught scenarios also start to rhyme with each other by the later volumes, just with different settings. The supporting cast, while charming, mostly exists to react to the leads rather than carry their own arcs, so the world outside the central couple stays a little thin.

Verdict

I Have a Crush at Work knows exactly what kind of manga it wants to be and executes that vision well. It's not going to surprise you with depth it never promised, but as a purely enjoyable, well-paced office romantic comedy, it delivers consistently.