What Did You Eat Yesterday? vol. 22

Life continues on as usual for Shiro and Kenji for most of this volume.  Their favorite bakery is closing as its owner moves to a new location, so they’re going to have to find a new source for freshly baked bread.  A new supermarket opens up in their area, giving Shiro another option in his efforts to find the best ingredients at the lowest prices.  They also have to deal with a typhoon and the possibility that Kenji may have been cursed by the husband of a defendant in one of Shiro’s cases.  Through it all, they’ve got each other and lots of good food to share together.

There is one thing that sets this volume apart from recent ones:  It features the wedding of Daisaku Kohinata and Wataru “Gilbert” Inoue!  This has been built up for a while now and the ceremony gets a chapter all to itself here – no cooking in this one.  Even though it’s not any longer than the other chapters here, mangaka Fumi Yoshinaga packs it full of detail to make it stand out amongst the rest.  From Shiro and Kenji angsting about how much they should give the newly wedded couple to their reactions to the parade of stars attending, it’s at real joy to see how our main characters react to all of this.

The standout moment of the event, though, is Shiro’s speech as best man as while he’s ostensibly there to toast the newlyweds, he also manages to make it about himself and Kenji as well.  In a way that will likely melt the heart of any longtime reader and get them hoping to see these two tie the knot as well.  While the frustrating realities of same-sex marriage in Japan are touched upon in a subsequent chapter, the event and its aftermath are a memorable milestone in this series.  We can only hope that if Shiro and Kenji tie the knot someday, they’ll be able to do it with all of the rights entitled to heterosexual couples in the country.