The Case of Ritsu Onodera No.1 (2024)

“The Case of Ritsu Onodera No.1” (小野寺律の場合 No.1, Onodera Ritsu no Baai No.1) is the first full chapter of The Case of Ritsu Onodera and the first overall chapter of the Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi manga series.

Release Information[]

“The Case of Ritsu Onodera No.1” was first released in The Ruby magazine in its debut issue on October 13th, 2006.^[1] Alongside “The Case of Ritsu Onodera” receiving its debut, “The Case of Chiaki Yoshino” was released in the same issue in the form of a light novel chapter. Both would later be compiled in volumes, Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi: The Case of Ritsu Onodera Volume 1 and The Case of Chiaki Yoshino Volume 1 respectively.

Short Summary[]

"The Case of Ritsu Onodera No.1" introduces Ritsu Onodera as he begins his new job at Marukawa Publishing. Ritsu has left his literature editing job at his father's company to work where he won't be accused of receiving favoritism. Although he applied to edit literature at Marukawa, he is instead assigned the shoujo manga department Emerald where he meets his new boss Masamune Takano. After seeing the stress of editing a monthly manga magazine, including being kissed to pose for a mangaka and pulling an all-nighter, he discovers that his new boss is his first love from high-school. Realizing that their breakup was a misunderstanding, Takano becomes determined to get Ritsu back, but Ritsu is determined to focus on his career and rejects him. The chapter ends with Ritsu realizing that the neighbor he's never met is Takano.

Long Summary[]

“The Case of Ritsu Onodera No.1” opens up on a flashback, depicting Ritsu Onodera confessing his love to Masamune Takano, then Masamune Saga, during their high school days during which they were 15 and 17 years old respectively. Ritsu thinks about how back during those days everything was incredibly pure, but comparatively a decade later he’s become incredibly jaded and has completely sworn off romance due to his poor high school experience.

In the present day during which the story takes place, ten years after the first few pages, Ritsu, now 25 years old, is told by a woman from Marukawa Publishing’s management department that he has been assigned to Emerald, Marukawa’s shoujo manga editing division. Ritsu is unhappy to hear this, as at his previous job at Onodera Publishing he worked as a literature editor, he wanted to continue doing that after transferring companies. He expresses this to the management employee, but she shows him that the paperwork very clearly says that he has been assigned to the shoujo manga division, it wasn’t a mistake.

The management employee escorts Ritsu to the fourth floor, where the Emerald editing department resides. Along the way, she mentions to him that Emerald is Marukawa’s number one editing department, even having received an award from the president of the company. She specifically cites the current editor-in-chief, Takano, as the reason the department has come to be as great as it currently is. Ritsu thinks to himself that he should at least connect with the editor-in-chief and learn a thing or two before putting in his two weeks notice, but before he can even finish introducing himself to the department, he is introduced to the sight of Emerald during Hell Week.

Hell Week is the end of the editorial cycle, during which both editors, authors, and their assistants all feel the stress of a 20-day release catching up to them as they try their best to meet the deadlines of the printing offices they work with. In this case, Yoshiyuki Hatori, Shouta Kisa, and Kanade Mino, all Emerald editors, are all sprawled out at their work stations, looking absolutely exhausted. Ritsu is shocked at the sight, and the management employee abandons him at the scene, unwilling to deal with the department in its current state. Any other passersby do the same thing, rushing past Ritsu as he tries to ask them questions.

Eventually, Ritsu enters the Emerald cubicle, approaching Kisa to introduce himself. When Kisa doesn’t respond, Ritsu reaches out to nudge him awake, but he falls right out of his chair. Kisa calls over to Takano upon realizing that Ritsu is a new employee, and after the fourth call, Takano slams his desk to quiet him down. The image that Ritsu had in his mind of the so-called amazing editor-in-chief that the woman from management had been telling him about was instantly shattered, with a rude Takano standing in his place. Despite his anger at Takano’s blasé attitude towards him, Ritsu tries to remain polite. But when Takano calls him useless after hearing that he hasn’t ever done editorial work with manga before, Ritsu decides that Takano is a horrible person.

After that interaction, Hatori calls over to mention that Iori Satou is in a lounge with a replacement manuscript for this magazine’s release. Takano walks Ritsu there to give him a taste of what working in the department would look like. After asking Satou to make a kiss drawing more dramatic, Ritsu asks if he should get sample material for reference, however before he can go anywhere, Takano makes a sample out of the two of them by kissing him right in front of the author.

Afterwards, Ritsu is in a breakroom, thinking back to his previous job at his family’s publishing house. He got to work with a lot of big-name authors in his previous role, and his co-workers constantly would complain about how he was only in the position he was due to nepotism and how his authors were the ones putting in all the work. Ritsu had never intended to use his parents’ connections in order to get anywhere in his career, so in that moment he decided to switch publishing companies to prove the people saying he was just riding his fathers’ coattails wrong. As he continues to rest in the breakroom, Takano approaches him, and encourages him to quit if he doesn’t want to work in shoujo manga, once again implying that Ritsu would be useless if he stuck around. This only encourages Ritsu to throw himself fully into learning about shoujo manga, not wanting to accept that he would be useless without having even tried yet.

The next day Ritsu returns to work tired, having spent his night reading 100 volumes of shoujo manga. He is greeted by Hatori, Kisa, and Mino, who are all doing much better than they were yesterday, having recovered from Hell Week. Taken aback by how different things were compared to yesterday, Ritsu pulls another Marukawa employee into the bathroom to interrogate them on just what happened. The employee informs him of how the Emerald editing department works around a 20-day editing cycle and how they had just come out of one, so they were refreshed now.

When Ritsu returns to the cubicle, Mino and Kisa give him pointers on the basics of phototypesetting. When shown a panel with lots of tone and lacking in drawings, Ritsu feels like he’s looking at something empty, as if the author omitted content. Takano immediately throws a ruler at him from across the room, yelling at him that what he’s looking at is a “heart-throb panel,” something meant to make readers sympathize with the heroine of the story. Ritsu still doesn’t understand the point, his jaded personality from his past relationship and job interfering with his ability to believe in such things.

Suddenly, Takano approaches Ritsu, tussling his hair, saying that he feels as if they’ve met somewhere before. Ritsu brushes it off, saying that they possibly ran into each other due to being in the same industry, and Takano is able to agree with that. But only moments later, Ritsu mentions that he used to read all the books at his school library as a student, and Takano is struck that Ritsu is his ex-boyfriend, but he doesn’t mention that to Ritsu for the time-being.

Weeks pass, and an entire cycle has nearly come to pass since Ritsu has started working at the Emerald department. An author calls Takano informing him that she still isn’t done with her manuscript, and he ends up going to her workplace with Ritsu in order to get things moving along. She is insistent on getting a particular double page spread perfect, and that pressure combined with Takano’s rude way of speech seems to only be making her panic more from Ritsu’s perspective, so he steps in with some words of encouragement for her. In the end, it’s revealed the deadline has actually been moved to tomorrow, and in the end the manuscript is finished on time.

After collecting the manuscript following an all-nighter, Ritsu and Takano return to Marukawa. Takano shows his appreciation towards Ritsu for helping bring down the author from panicking, and Ritsu thinks about how much Takano is doing what Ritsu dreams of doing: bringing out his authors’ full potential, creating and selling good books, and so on. And as Ritsu’s heart skips a beat and he thinks to himself that he never wanted to fall in love again, Takano says that Ritsu hasn’t changed. This confuses Ritsu, because he still isn’t aware that Takano is his ex-boyfriend.

Takano pushes Ritsu down onto a couch and forces a kiss on him, claiming to do so to spark his memory. Ritsu still doesn’t understand what Takano is getting at, until he finally mentions something as he leaves for the printing agency: that his name used to be Masamune Saga before his parents divorced. Ritsu immediately recognizes the name, thinking back to the moment in high school when he asked if Saga loved him and was laughed at. He took the laugh to mean that Saga was playing with him, but Takano doesn’t remember the events this way.

Takano remembers Ritsu kicking him and disappearing without a word, as it is later revealed that Ritsu began studying abroad after their break-up, this seems to line up more with the true events of the story. When Ritsu explains why he left, the laugh, Takano calls him an idiot for interpreting it in that way, citing it was most likely out of embarrassment at the time, and immediately shows interest in rekindling their past relationship. He claims that he’ll make Ritsu say that he loves him again. Ritsu on the other hand swears to himself that he won’t allow such a thing to happen.

Soon after, Ritsu and Takano meet right outside of their apartment doors, finding out that they’re actually neighbors, Ritsu in apartment 1202 and Takano in 1201. They weren’t aware of this despite having lived in the same building for around a year.

The chapter closes off with a countdown box that would become commonplace in future chapters: a box counting down the days until Ritsu would fall completely in love with Takano. This box has 364 days left, just over a year as of the end of this chapter.

Adaptations[]

Drama CD[]

The Drama CD adaptation of “The Case of Ritsu Onodera No.1” is part of Drama CD 1. The CD set was released July 31st, 2008, within a month of the release of Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi Volume 1. No.1’s adaptation is part of the first disc, on Tracks 1 through 6.

Anime[]

The anime adaptation of this chapter takes place over the first two episodes of Season 1 of the Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi anime, First Impressions Are the Most Lasting and A Man Has Free Choice to Begin Love But Not to End It, having released on April 9th, 2011 and April 16th, 2011 respectively.

This adaptation adds anime-original content, such as a scene in which Ritsu dreams of Takano kissing him, as well as Ritsu having just moved into the apartment neighboring Takano’s at the end of Episode 2. In the original, there was no dream sequence, and Ritsu had been living in his current apartment for around a year by his own estimate, and just hadn’t met Takano due to their work schedules.

Additionally, the anime gave a name to the character that Takano called at the printing office in order to get the un-named author an extension to finish her manuscript in time. In the original scene in the manga, Takano never addresses him by a name, but in the anime he calls him Sasaki. He would later appear in person in Adversity Makes a Man Wise, Season 1 Episode 4.

Character Introductions[]

• Ritsu Onodera
• Masamune Takano
• Shouta Kisa
• Kanade Mino
• Yoshiyuki Hatori
• Iori Satou

Trivia[]

• On the chapter cover, Takano is holding manga pages. Upon close inspection, they seem to be pages depicting Junjou Romantica, as both Misaki Takahashi and Suzuki-san can be seen across multiple panels.

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