BLog: Restart After Coming Back Home
BLog reviews recent boys love, yaoi and LGBTQ+ English translation manga.
Restart After Coming Back Home
Story and art: Cocomi
Translation: Anna Schnell
Publisher: Seven Seas Entertainment
Release Date: November 13, 2021
Boys’ love skews towards stories about high school aged guys. That makes sense to me, there’s something romantic about that period of life. Hormones and inexplicable crushes, young people on the verge of being adults, expectations of conformity and the quiet rebellion of going against it all with a single kiss.
That said, it’s refreshing–especially as someone who’s in that weird in between stage, definitely not a young adult but certainly not in a place where I feel like a settled, acclimated “adult”–to see BL characters in the next phase of their life. I think of stories like Our Dining Table (one of my all time favs), or Seaside Stranger. There is a certain romance about that in between stage. Struggling to find your place in the world, failed jobs or relationships, feeling aimless or stuck, the hope that someone will come along and give you new purpose.
Maybe it’s not a surprise a manga with a title like Restart After Coming Back Home falls into the latter.
Hot-headed Kozuka Mitsuomi has done just that. Fired from a job in Tokyo, he’s returned to his hometown where he’s staying with his parents, who run a store that sells things for Buddhist home memorial alters. He’s been charmed into friendship with Kumai Yamato, a happy-go-lucky farm boy neighbour his age. While Mitsuomi realizes his feelings for Yamato pretty quickly the relationship is imbalanced–Yamato was adopted by crotchety old Jiichan and his late wife in high school, so he spent years hearing about Mitsuomi from his mother. Despite his easy going nature, Yamato is more of an enigma, rarely talking about himself or his past.
There’s something lovely about stories like Restart, Our Dining Table and Seaside Stranger; maybe we could call the BL subgenre “bucolic orphan romance”. Restart After Coming Back Home definitely hits on the best aspects of these types of stories. Despite its lightness and low stakes there’s still hearty emotional substance. The balance in Restart rests on Mitsuomi, who was raised in a big, loving family but struggles to find his place and Yamato, who was orphaned as a baby and doesn’t know if he can love someone in that way after growing up with little intimate emotional connection, but has never doubted his place working and caring for old Jiichan, especially after the death of his wife.
Like Boy Meets Maria, it’s something that resonates with me in these stories we don’t get in enough “Western” media. It’s almost like the emotional version of negative space–I’m sure there’s a term for it in Japanese art criticism that I don’t know, the closest I can think of is the concept of ma. In Boy Meets Maria we follow Taiga, a happy-go-lucky dumbass, but that ends up being a protective mask for an unspoken emptiness he feels inside of himself from always turning away from emotional pain and life’s difficulties. In Restart, the reversal is that, while Mitsuomi is the one who feels like his life is going nowhere and Yamato is always smiling, the latter is the one who hides that emptiness. That’s the tragic beauty of our bucolic orphan romance stories, the excavation of emotional emptiness that comes from pain and isolation.
This one is also cute beyond anything, despite its subtle sadness. The most refreshing thing about their burgeoning relationship is that while they admit two men in a relationship isn’t the norm in society, and they expect people to have their judgements, neither of them agonize over it. They fall into the relationship very easily. Maybe that’s the key, because the story doesn’t fall into the standard “BUT WE’RE BOTH MEN! HOW COULD THIS EVER WORK?!” trope, it leaves plenty of room to explore the characters’ emotional depths as they come together. Interestingly the artist Cocomi writes in the afterword that the book has a happy ending “but… maybe being lovers doesn’tgo smoothly for them. Maybe they break up, maybe they get back together again, maybe they go through those stages more than once.”
Again… realism, not something you usually look for in BL, but very much welcome. And I suppose we’ll find out how their story continues in Restart After Growing Hungry.
Level of Problematic: Red bean and roasted soybean rice balls; extremely delectable, goes down smooth.
Level of Adorable: Farm boy’s fresh vegetables; this one is so incredibly fluffy and adorable. If you’re into two boys lovingly teasing each other and then sharing feelings for 200 pages, then this is the BL for you.
Level of Spiciness: Small town festival oden; SIGH. About as spicy as a meal at a New Years Festival stand. But lots of feels.
