Is Mysterious Girlfriend X Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Akira Tsubaki doesn't know much about girls, which is part of why he's so unsettled when Mikoto Urabe, the quiet new transfer student who's never without a pair of scissors, suddenly becomes a fixture in his life. The spark that sets it off is strange: he tastes a drop of her drool, and it hits him like a love-sickness fever. From there, Riichi Ueshiba builds an entire romance around that one bizarre, oddly tender ritual — Urabe's drool, shared in small doses, becomes the strangest love language in shonen-adjacent manga, and somehow the series makes it work.

What it does well

The central gimmick could easily have stayed a one-note joke, but Ueshiba uses it as a way into something genuinely sincere. Urabe is withdrawn and hard to read, and the drool bond becomes the one place she lets herself be vulnerable — the manga is really about two people who are bad at expressing themselves finding one specific, strange way to do it anyway. The slow-burn pacing gives the relationship real room to develop instead of rushing the two leads together.

The supporting couple, Kouhei and Ayuko, works as a clean contrast — a more conventional relationship running parallel to Tsubaki and Urabe's strange one, which makes the main couple's weirdness read as a feature rather than a gimmick the story doesn't know what to do with. Ueshiba's art is clean and expressive, especially good at quiet, charged moments where almost nothing happens on the page but the tension is doing all the work.

Where it falls short

The central hook is also a ceiling: once you understand the drool-bond premise, a lot of the series' tension comes from variations on the same idea, and some readers will find that repetitive well before the story's ready to move on. Urabe's reserve, which is charming early on, occasionally tips into frustrating when the plot needs her to stay opaque a little longer than feels earned. And some of the fanservice moments lean into the kind of broad, slapstick-y nudity common to the genre, which won't land for every reader even by romantic-comedy standards.

Verdict

A genuinely odd, genuinely sweet romance that turns one strange ritual into a real emotional throughline — worth it if you want a slow-burn love story that isn't afraid to be weird about it.