At a first glance, 5-toubun might look like a run-of-the-mill harem manga: an unsociable, bland-looking, high-achieving high school boy suddenly finds himself the tutor of five attractive, trope-caricatured quintuplets with terrible studying skills (the mature hot one! the tsundere! the shy nerd! the genki girl! the oblivious friend!). As the first pages of the story make clear, hijinks will ensue that somehow lead to him marrying one in a few years.

As it turns out, there's much, much more to this story. Over the following dozens of chapters, we slowly learn more about what's led each character to be the person he or she is today. Centrally, we learn how those experiences affect their ideas of love and how that impacts all their relationships (with friends, strangers, parents, siblings, teachers, etc.).

More than 100 chapters in, it's clear that the story has been written and illustrated by a manga-ka with a very clear vision of the story's direction from day 1, to the benefit of attentive readers, encouraging you to reread and notice throwaway details with much greater importance later on and consider the importance of different narrative themes.

What seems like a cookie-cutter rom-com harem at first is ultimately a well-written, emotionally and mentally stimulating study on the meaning of love and how it shapes our romance, friendships, profession, families, and life goals.