Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy!

Yes, the title is very long and silly, but also quite apt.  This is a collection of shorts about a female mangaka named F-mi Y-naga who specializes in drawing yaoi manga and frequenting restaurants with good food.  She is IN NO WAY a thinly-veiled self-portrait of the person who wrote and illustrated this volume, Fumi Yoshinaga.  While her roots in yaoi manga still color a lot of her work, Yoshinaga’s main passions lie in dissecting human relationships and talking about good food which take center stage here.

In any manga where the focus is on food (see also “Iron Wok Jan”) the key to making it work is to have the characters sound believably excited and knowledgeable about the food they’re eating while making it look good on the page.  Yoshinaga pulls this off quite well, and if I ever go to Japan again, I’ll have to eat at one of the fifteen restaurants featured here (even the one that specializes in Italian).

As Yoshinaga’s other strength lies in relationships, these eight-page stories also detail Y-naga’s relationships with her live-in assistant S-hara and their mutual friends who share in their dining adventures.  These aren’t proper stories, but short character pieces that thrive on Y-naga’s antics.  Be it the dichotomy between her frumpy “at-home” self and flashy out-on-the-town appearance, her cluelessness about a friend’s sexual orientation, how her advances during dinner frightened an acquaintance into marriage, there’s a lot of stuff to (ahem…) savor here.

Still, while I did like this, it’s more for fans of Yoshinaga than anyone else.  Those who are not already into her character-driven style or devotion to the foodie lifestyle might find these stories to be slight and a little self-indulgent.  I’ll admit that’s probably true, but as one of the converted I didn’t find that to be a problem.  I’m not sure I’d want another volume of this, but this collection turned out to be a pleasant diversion.