I am so excited to be able to review this particular book as my first review of 2022! Since I first read this on Comic Walker, I’ve been super excited to get it as a collected volume.
Tsukuritai Onna to Tabetai Onna, Volume 1 (作りたい女と食べたい女) is what I’d like to think is the future of Yuri. Nomoto-san is a office worker who is stressed. As she sits down to eat lunch a male coworker “compliments” her lunch by commenting that she’ll make a great wife. Nomoto understandably resents the implication that her life is nothing more than practice to be useful to a man. Angry, she goes home and cooks a massive meal, far more than she can eat.
Just the day before she had seen her next door neighbor, Kasuga-san, a large women, who had come home with multiple buckets of KFC for herself. In a moment of courage, Nomoto offers some of her too-large-for-one meal to Kasuga. And so, a friendship is born.
In this first volume, Nomoto will make meal after meal, while she enjoys Kasuga’s enjoyment of the food. When Nomoto gets her period and is down with bad cramps, Kasuga realizes something is up immediately because she can’t smell any food cooking – and so she texts to see if she can do something for Nomoto. I was all in, but that simple act of kindness pinged all my *THIS IS GOOD* alarms. And indeed, Kasuga understands Nomoto’s issue, buys her pads, pain killers and they make comfort food together. It was perfect.
Kasuga offers money to Nomoto, because she rightly understands that Nomoto is spending a lot more on meals than normal. Nomoto tries to refuse, but Kasuga’s reasoning and sincerity would be too much for anyone. ^_^ At this point, Nomoto is starting to realize how much she enjoys her time with Kasuga and we can see that Kasuga agrees, when she invites Nomoto on a drive out to a farmer’s market. They shop for fresh veggies, eat ice cream and generally have a lovely time. They continue to have fun together, including making a 5 liter giant flan in a rice cooker. ^_^
The volume ends with Nomoto asking Kasuga to spend Christmas and New Year making and eating food. In an omake, Nomoto buys a brand new platter just because it would be pretty to serve something for Kasuga in. And indeed, when she serves her fried rice, it is a perfect platter. As Kasuga finishes every last grain of rice, Nomoto thinks that she is so very glad she had some courage that day.
Okay, in case you can’t tell, I LOVE this manga. Everything about it is just right. It has a woman who is not the same slim, small, fashionable working woman we keep seeing. I’ve just flipped through and I don’t think we see Kasuga working, but her work jacket has a logo is similar to that a large distributor of alcoholic beverages and she drives, so I’m going to take a leap and assume she does delivery for an alcoholic beverage distributor.
Here we get to watch adult women loving food and eating to their heart’s content without any tiresome thoughts on /insert something stupid about what women should or should not do./ This will always appeal to me. The way to my heart is through food and food manga. ^_^
I know from reading further on Comic Walker, that Nomoto’s thoughts about Kasuga will change and she will realize that she likes her, which you too can read if you pick up Volume 2. (That’s next on my to-read list.) In a Twitter conversation some months ago, it was also noted that this manga comes with a content warning for workplace sexual harassment, but unless I am missing it, I don’t see it on the book or site anymore. It’s pretty plain by Nomoto’s reaction, that she’s very uncomfortable with the man who approached her at work. Nomoto’s feeling are implicit in that one scene. I like that the story focuses on the two of them, without an external “reason” Nomoto doesn’t like men. The scene where she realizes she likes Kasuga is charming. It doesn’t need a reason, other than her affection. Update: CW has reminded me that the content warning was for Chapter 16, so I had forgotten something. My mistake.
Kasuga is a character marked with very subtle expressions. For this alone, I’d call this art amazing. Her face changes very little, but even slight shifts carry a lot of weight. Especially compared to excitable Nomoto, Kasuga almost seems to have no affect, but that’s not at all true. Nomoto and we can tell exactly what Kasuga feels with subtle, but telling shifts in her expression.
The focus on eating and mouths here is not gross, completely unlike a similar obsession in Blue is the Warmest Color movie, which I found creepy and intrusive.
In a lot of ways, I think this story is emblematic of a shift in queer story-telling overall. So much of queer work in the last century was rooted in trauma (isolation, rejection, ostracization, etc.). Now we’re seeing more positivity in our fiction and I’m all for it. I would like to see much more Yuri sitting in a place that isn’t a closed-off fantasy world but also gives no or little room to intolerance. Yes, of course, harassment and violence exist in the real world and yes, definitely there needs to be some manga that addresses that. And…there are some now and there will be more. I’m glad to see this one that is about something else entirely – two women bonding over food.
Ratings:
Art – 9
Story – 9
Characters – 9 We don’t know much about them, but what we know is sufficient to know them
Service – Does massive platters of food count? No? Then…no.
Yuri – 2 in this volume, more to come.
Overall – 9 but only so there is somewhere to go up.
And so I start this new year with a “best of breed” and declare Tsukuritai Onna to Tabetai Onna as a harbinger of great work to come in the new year!
If you get the book, there is a QR code to download the cover art as a digital poster…and so I have. ^_^
Because I loved Volume 1 so very much, I ran out immediately after reviewing it, and bought Tsukuritai Onna to Tabetai Onna, Volume 2 (作りたい女と食べたい女) as a digital release (because as has become increasingly common, my copy was sitting in a storage unit in Japan.) But now that it has arrived and I’m taking time to read it again, I wanted to let you know all about it!
Or the time that Kasuga suggests making fruit sandwiches and Nomoto practically squeals, “What the what? That sound so fun!”
Other strange bits were the Luna ballets and Himeko making a comment about being pregnant, which would definitely have kept her out of space. Also the final thanks felt like there was stuff that was supposed to have been said, and instead we have “thank you very much” shouted a us an excessive number of times, even for one of these musicals.
