Is The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manga, 120 chapters, 12 volumes
Run	2018–2024 · completed
Community score	AniList 7.9 · MangaUpdates 7.9
Content	None significant
Where to read	Comikey — official

Overview

Kaede Komura has a crush on his seatmate Mie-san, who has terrible eyesight and, without fail, never seems to have her glasses on hand exactly when she needs them. That's essentially the whole premise: every chapter finds a new, specific situation where Mie's poor vision creates a small moment of comedy, embarrassment, or accidental closeness between the two of them, and the manga rides that one joke for its entire run.

What it does well

The craft here is genuinely impressive once you notice it. A gag this narrow could easily run out of ideas within a few chapters, but Koume Fujichika keeps finding new angles on it -- different settings, different side characters reacting to it, different emotional shades from funny to sweet to quietly romantic -- without the core joke ever feeling like it's just being repeated on autopilot. The comedic timing is sharp and visual, built for a quick, punchy read rather than long dialogue exchanges, which makes individual chapters satisfying even in isolation. Underneath all the repetition, Kaede and Mie's actual feelings for each other come through as sincere rather than just an excuse for the joke to keep happening, which gives the manga a real emotional throughline even without much plot.

Where it falls short

There's essentially no story here beyond the central gag and a very slow-building mutual crush, so if you need narrative momentum or stakes, this isn't going to provide them. Reading a large stack of chapters back to back also makes the repetition much more obvious than reading it the way it was originally serialized, one chapter a month; in bulk, some of the variations start to blur together. The side cast stays thin throughout, mostly existing to react to or set up the next glasses-related situation rather than getting real arcs of their own, even the classmates who show up in nearly every chapter.

Verdict

The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses is a genre exercise done with real skill -- take one simple, narrow idea and see how much warmth and variety you can wring out of it without ever really moving past it. Read a few chapters at a time and it's consistently charming; marathon the whole thing and the repetition becomes more visible. Either way, it's a good example of gag manga craft, even if it's never going to be mistaken for a plot-driven read.