James Nicoll Reviews

2023’s Kindergarten Wars, Volume One is the first tankōbon of You Chiba’s ongoing comedic manga series, Yōchien Wars (the original Japanese title). The manga has been serialized on the Shōnen Jump+ site since 2022. Christine Dashiell’s translation was released in 2025.

Poor Rita! She yearns for a boyfriend. Rita has much to offer a beau, yet love escapes her. Her seemingly unpromising workplace — a kindergarten — offers many potential meet-cutes with hunky young men.

If only Rita could stop shooting them in the head.

Her employer, Kindergarten Noir, specializes in teaching the children of the famous, the rich, the powerful¹. Or to put it another way, children who face a high risk of kidnapping or assassination. Faced with the daunting task of protecting high risk children, the school’s administration resorted to an unlikely source of teachers: the world’s prisons.

Rita, aka Prisoner 999, is a superlatively skilled assassin… but not quite skilled enough to avoid prison. Rather than spend the rest of her life imprisoned, Rita agreed to teach at Kindergarten Noir. The risks are high, but Rita is very, very good at her job. If only she were as skilled at meeting men… without killing them.

Over and over, attractive men try to kidnap or kill children at Kindergarten Noir. Over and over, they find themselves face to face with the bubbly, seemingly naïve Rita. Each man does his best to seduce the desperate young woman… only to discover how quickly Rita will kill someone who does not meet her exacting standards.

Is Rita doomed to be a spinster? Or is true love right under her nose?

~oOo~

Rita might appear to be a complete ditz, but only because she is… at least as far as romance and attractive men are concerned. Her situational awareness is keen enough to notice distant rooftop snipers, her reflexes fast enough to parry bullets with a gardening trowel, her running speed borders on super-human, on top of which she is a deadly shot. All of this adds up to someone who is very hard to kill and extremely good at killing.

However, what actually gets her potential boyfriends killed isn’t that they are assassins there to kill her charges, but that each of them answers Rita’s questions about how to eat ramen incorrectly. If you treasure your life, don’t start with the meat! And don’t say you hate ramen. I feel like there’s a cultural subtlety I am missing.

The manga is careful to make it clear that the men with whom Rita is briefly smitten are all monsters faking an interest in Rita purely to get an opportunity to kill her. It’s not as if she’s killing people who don’t deserve it. At least, not in Volume One.

This manga knows exactly what it wants to be and how to be what it wants to be. There aren’t many surprises, at least in Volume One, but if you want a competent, straightforward, violent story about a woman whose search for love is perpetually kneecapped by her habit of shooting the people she meets in the head, this is the manga for you.

Kindergarten Wars, Volume One is available here (Yen Press), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

I did not find Kindergarten Wars, Volume One at Bookshop UK.

1: I assumed that the setting is Japan but it might not be. Kindergarten Noir appears to cater to the whole world. In any case, USA delenda est.