What Did You Eat Yesterday? vol. 18

You know, it’s been some time since we’ve checked in on Kenji and Shiro.  Vol. 18 finds the former at something of a crossroads as the manager of his salon has finally returned from Vietnam.  This leads everyone to assume that Kenji’s status as the de facto manager is over and now the stylist is going to have to figure out what he wants to do next.  Shiro has no such problems as business at the law firm he works at is as steady as ever.  His main concern these days is planning for the (potential, evental) end of his life and making sure that Kenji is going to be provided for in that instance.  With gay marriage still not a thing in Japan, does this mean Shiro will have to adopt Kenji in order to make that happen?  It’s not all doom and gloom in their world as a Halloween visit with Wataru and Kohinata and a New Year’s Eve dinner with their neighbors help to brighten their spirits.  There’s even room for a potential change to the status quo as a dinner Shiro has with his former boss offers the chance for him to tell her about his sexual orientation after all this time.

If it sounds like age is creeping up on Kenji and Shiro, that’s because we find out in this volume that they’re in their fifties now.  This actually means that, all appearances to the contrary, time has actually been progressing in the world of “What Did You Eat Yesterday?”  The series has been executing on its formula of character drama, interruption for food preparation, and followed by resolution of said drama for so long now that the characters and world they inhabit had struck me as unchanging.  I realize I was wrong about that now, and that’s fine.  The fact that this series has been delivering a slowly changing world makes it more interesting and further proof of mangaka Fumi Yoshinaga’s skills as a storyteller.  We thought we were getting a simple series about the dinners two gay guys have together, and it has delievered its own small yet tightly connected world after all this time.  Shiro may be planning for his end here, but I’d still like to see this series continue for a good long while.