I Want To Hold Aono-kun So Badly I Could Die is a seinen manga written by Umi Shiina and published in Afternoon. as of writing this shrine, Nov 6-7 2025, it finished serialization the other day, with the final japanese volume coming out in january 2026. it's not a very well-known manga and it deserves so much attention and i LOVE IT!!!!!! so i'm making a tiny shrine about it in honor of it completing its run because it's more or less my favorite manga at this point. ♡
first off though, some context. i decided to read aono-kun after i read this shrine back in 2023. i had heard of aono-kun by this point because i had read the beginning chapters of The Summer Hikaru Died (there were only 6 chapters of hikaru at the time) and found it fun but not quite hitting the niche i was hoping for. there aono-kun was, floating at the bottom of hikaru's page on anilist, number 1 in recommended titles to check out if you like hikaru or the idea of hikaru. aono-kun's silly-sounding description made it sound like it wasn't going to be quite what i was hoping for (by the way, aono-kun blows hikaru out of the water, if you were curious). anyways, reading hannah's shrine and seeing how much love she has for the manga incentivized me to check it out. so i read it. and i devoured all currently eng-published 52 chapters in like 2 sittings. i reread it a week later--i've reread it countless times at this point. well, except for the last 2 volumes that haven't been translated into english yet.
to further illustrate how much i love this manga, like i said, aono-kun doesn't have any english physical releases and the official kodansha digital releases are fairly far behind and there's no one currently scanlating it. so i literally bought the most recent volume (at the time) from japan and took pictures of the pages i couldn't understand to put through google translate so i could figure out what was going on.
so what is aono-kun about? from Kodansha:
“I would die if it would allow me to touch you. That is my love.”
Airhead Yuri-chan and her boyfriend Aono-kun had a perfectly normal relationship until one day Aono-kun suddenly “passed away”… They will never be bound together, and they cannot even touch. This is their difficult and almost too sincere love story.
...i mentioned the silly-sounding official description didn't quite entice me to read it. so what is aono-kun about, really?
aono-kun is a horror romance. one of aono's biggest strengths is the way it combines its tone; aono isn't a horror-before-it's-a-romance but it's by no means a romance-before-it's-a-horror either. we get silly shoujo tropes, we get body horror, it's all in here. this is the shoujo horror you've been wanting to read. this is a manga for people who grew up liking fruits basket before they got really into horror somewhere along the line. this is a manga for people who liked inuyasha/kikyo because of how doomed their relationship was. and, of course, this is a manga for when they cry fans.
brief plot summary: aono-kun begins with yuri kariya meeting ryuhei aono, semi-popular boy at school. aono helps her pick up books she dropped one day and she immediately develops a crush on him and dedicates herself to pursuing him, asking him out despite them not talking at all in the interim. surprisingly, aono says yes, and they begin to date...until two weeks later, aono dies. yuri, distraught, attempts to kill herself, and this summons aono's ghost. with aono's ghost now tethered to yuri, the two reignite their relationship.
as you can hopefully glean from this summary, this is a manga about codependency and being very very lonely and being a very very lonely teenager. the horror of the manga shines here in the way it intertwines the supernatural and the mundane, the way the two feed on each other, the ouroboros of the world.
i don't want to list specific content warnings on this shrine because there are some spoilers that are kind of inevitably implied in giving specifics and aono-kun is best experienced by jumping into it and seeing it all unravel for yourself. again: this is a horror story. i don't recommend reading aono-kun if you aren't prepared for that, especially if seeing children in neglectful, abusive, and overall just bad and toxic situations is hard for you. there is also a lot of implied sexual violence.
READ AONO-KUN!! join us ten fans! make our ranks grow. it deserves it.
(of course you can find and read it somewhere else. but please consider supporting it if you like it because i would kill to have this series on my shelf in english and the only way that will happen is if kodansha thinks it's worth it)
