Is Mr. Paper Bag is in Love Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

A college student named Umi Asagi gets a confession and a ring from a stranger wearing a paper bag over his head. She doesn't know his name, his face, or why he picked her. Her best friend calls it exactly what it looks like — a red flag — and chases him off. Umi, against her own better judgment, finds she misses the attention anyway. Mr. Paper Bag is in Love is a complete two-volume romantic comedy from Riko Amaebi, built entirely around the slow, deliberate work of turning an objectively alarming premise into something that earns its sweetness.

What it does well

The manga is honest about its own setup in a way a lot of stalker-romance premises aren't. It doesn't ask you to find Paper-Bag charming on arrival; it asks you to sit with how strange and faintly unsettling his devotion looks from the outside, the same way Umi's friend does, before slowly letting you see what Umi sees. That patience pays off in a bonus chapter that finally explains his fixation on her — a small, specific reason rather than a generic "love at first sight" — and it reframes the whole book in retrospect. The soft, rounded art style does a lot of the heavy lifting here too; with a cast this small, nearly every page rides on facial expression, and Amaebi draws Umi's gradual thaw convincingly. The sharpest structural choice is bringing in an actual stalker midway through — a man whose interest in Umi has none of Paper-Bag's self-aware restraint — which gives the story a clean, concrete way to show you the difference between "odd and devoted" and "genuinely dangerous" instead of just telling you.

Where it falls short

That real-stalker subplot is also where the book's biggest weakness shows up: it arrives and gets resolved in a hurry, because there simply isn't room for it in two volumes. The pacing throughout feels compressed rather than efficient — beats that would land harder with another chapter or two to breathe instead rush past. The opening stretch asks for real patience, too; Paper-Bag secretly watching and trailing a woman he's never spoken to is uncomfortable by design, and the manga sits in that discomfort a little longer than some readers will want to tolerate before it starts earning its warmth. And because the entire cast is essentially Umi, her best friend, and Paper-Bag, there's no secondary relationship or subplot to lean on if the central pairing isn't working for you yet — you're either in it or you're not.

Verdict

This is a small, specific book that knows exactly what it's trying to pull off: start uncomfortable, earn your trust slowly, land somewhere genuinely warm. It mostly gets there. The same brevity that makes it an easy afternoon read is what rushes its biggest swing, but for two volumes of a shy man in a paper bag and the woman who decides to find out why, it closes the gap between "that's creepy" and "that's actually kind of sweet" better than the premise has any right to.