Is They Are Still Being Shaken This Morning Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manga (shōnen), 3 volumes
Run	2024–present · ongoing
Community score	AniList 8.0 · MangaUpdates 7.6
Where to read	Seven Seas Entertainment — official

Overview

Every morning at 6:58, a train pulls out toward Maibara Station carrying the same regulars, and one particular car has developed a shared obsession: two high schoolers from different schools who sit near each other, clearly like each other, and have never said a word. They Are Still Being Shaken This Morning is built almost entirely on that premise — the will-they-won't-they isn't between the two leads and each other, it's between the two leads and an entire train car rooting for them.

Eiji Masuda, best known for My Monster Secret, swaps that series' broad comedy for something quieter and more observational, though the sense of humor is unmistakably the same.

What it does well

The hook is the whole show, and it's a good one. Turning the audience surrogate into a literal car full of invested strangers — a manager, an office worker, a university student, all silently cheering for two kids who don't even know they're being watched — gives the manga a comic engine most slow-burn romances don't have. Their reactions, theories, and quiet despair at every missed opportunity do a lot of the comedic heavy lifting, and it works because Masuda treats their investment as sincere rather than mocking it.

Hikoichi and Nayu themselves are drawn with real specificity in their awkwardness — the exact way Hikoichi overthinks a five-second window to say something, or how Nayu talks herself out of eye contact, feels observed rather than generic. That specificity is what keeps a premise this slight from feeling thin.

Because each chapter is essentially one commute, the manga has a natural, bite-sized rhythm that makes it easy to read a little at a time without losing the thread, and Masuda finds a surprising amount of variation within that repeated 20-minute window.

Where it falls short

The premise is also the ceiling. A story built around two people who barely speak has an inherent pacing problem if you're looking for the relationship to actually progress — this is a very slow burn by design, and readers who want real romantic momentum may find the lack of progress frustrating rather than charming.

The commuter ensemble, as fun as they are, sometimes takes up so much space that Hikoichi and Nayu start to feel more like symbols of the joke than people with their own interiority. And because the series is still relatively early, it hasn't yet had to prove the format can sustain itself over a longer run rather than just repeating the same beat with small variations.

Verdict

This is a rom-com that succeeds by fully committing to an unusual angle rather than trying to be a conventional love story — the joy is in watching strangers root for two people who can't get out of their own way. If the premise sounds charming rather than thin to you, it delivers exactly that.