Cross-dressing Tiger, Hidden Dragon!

Since it'll still be a little while before the next volumes for our current projects get released, we had some time on our hands to do something else, so we decided to take a request given to us by kubi a week ago. This is Shounen Princess by Seishirou Matsuri, and it's only five chapters collected in a single volume that was released about a year and a half ago. The story is as follows:

After seeing a picture of Naotora Kusunoki as a kid, the crown prince of the Kingdom of Urunei in Southeast Asia fell in love at first sight. The only problem is that Naotora is the son of a bureaucrat in the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Eager to please the prince, Naotora's father forces him to cross-dress and fly to Urunei to get married to the prince as "Nao". Once in Urunei, he unintentionally captures the hearts of the populace who see Nao as the return of Putri Harimau, the Tiger Girl of legend who had a hand in the founding of Urunei with the Dragon Prince long ago. However, there are some in Urunei who are not so happy about Nao's arrival.

There are also a few details we thought we should point out. The first is that there are certain Malay words written into the story, one phrase being "putri harimau" which is also used in the subtitle for the manga. As far as we can tell, putri is normally translated as either princess or daughter, and harimau is tiger. The reason why Putri Harimau may be referred to in the story as the Tiger Girl and not Tiger Princess is largely due to the accompanying kanji used to represent "putri harimau", namely 虎の娘 (tora no musume, literally tiger daughter or tiger girl). If the author had intended putri to mean princess, he probably would have written it as 虎の姫 (tora no hime, literally tiger princess). Other details have to do with the setting, which is called Urunei in the story, but that is very likely a reference to Brunei on the island of Borneo. However, at least one location featured in the story, the Raffles Hotel, is actually in Singapore.

So we hope you give this one a try and see if you like it. If nothing else, Nao is more than cute enough to make this a worthy project.

Shounen Princess ch. 1: Mediafire, Dropbox