Chapter one opens at a wedding. The groom is Futaro Uesugi, and the bride is one of five identical sisters. Her face is hidden and the series does not say which.
That single choice sets the rules. Readers know the shape of the ending before anything else happens, so every scene afterwards becomes evidence. Which sister fell for him and when, and who the child in the flashback actually is, were argued over for the whole run, and the argument is what made the series popular.
The plot itself is simple. Futaro, a poor honours student, is hired to tutor the Nakano sisters, all five of whom are failing. All five also dislike studying and dislike him, and the story proceeds by opening them up one at a time. Drawing five people with the same face so that expression and speech alone tell them apart was the authorโs real task, and from the middle volumes you can identify each of them without looking at the clothes.
Negi Haruba began serialisation in Weekly Shonen Magazine on 9 August 2017 and finished on 19 February 2020 with chapter 122, collected in 14 volumes. It won the shonen category of the 43rd Kodansha Manga Award.
Tezuka Productions animated the first season, twelve episodes from 11 January 2019. Further series and a film followed, which kept the title in conversation for years after the manga ended.
Knowing the ending does not spoil the reading. If anything, going back with the answer in hand and hearing the early dialogue differently is closer to how the thing was built.
