Holiday Review: BEAUTY AND THE FEAST

Of course, not every story aimed at young men from this year was so action-packed.  Sometimes it was about more cozy fantasy, like a hot widow who only wants to feed you good home cooking.

BEAUTY AND THE FEAST (Yakumo-san wa Eduke ga Shitai), by Satomi U.  First published in 2016 and first published in North America in 2021.

PLOT:

Yakumo Shuko was a young widow with little to occupy her days until Shohei moved in next door.  He's a high school boy living on his own while attending a local school on a baseball scholarship, largely subsisting off school lunches and convienence food.  Yakumo starts inviting Shohei to her apartment for dinner, something that reignites her love of cooking and eases both their loneliness.  As Yakumo learns more about Shohei, the more their unlikely friendship starts to change...

STORY:

It's easy to look at Beauty and the Feast and see just another food manga about lonely souls finding companionship and comfort over good food, much in the same vein as Sweetness and Lightning.  I wish I could just shake this feeling that this series will become far less about food and more about indulgent male romantic fantasy as it goes on.

That shouldn't seem possible considering that much of this volume is told from Yakumo's perspective.  For a while, I was able to roll with the notion that her meals with Shohei help give her days the purpose and structure that's been lacking since her husband's death and lets her indulge a little bit in some motherly feelings.  Then somewhere in the second half things start to get emotionally fuzzy.  Yakumo's attachment to Shohei is painted in increasingly girlish and romantic tones.  This is only emphasized by introducing Rui, Shohei's requisite Childhood Best Friend (tm) who is just as obsessed with dating Shohei as she is with baseball.

For what it's worth, Shohei seems largely oblivious to all this.  He spent many years basically being a latchkey kid due to his sports practice and like most teen boys he's a living food vacuum, so he's just happy to have regular home-cooked meals with other people.  It's only towards the end of the volume that things start to get emotionally fuzzy for him.  Apparently no one, not even the mangaka, ever stopped to think about how inappropriate the age gap is between this 28 year old woman and 16 year old boy.  They also never bothered to question the weirdness of setting up Yakumo as this awkward intersection between "MILF" and "Mom."  Why would they?  That's all part of the fantasy, of having a desirable young woman fawn over a young man who can readily serve as reader insert, and there's no room for that sort of reality.

ART:

Satoru U's art is kind of curious.  Their approach to character design is kind of odd.  The bodies tend to be fairly realistic (even if Yakumo's generous bustline is pushing things a little), but their faces are barely sketched out.  Those simple faces give them a lot of room to push their expressions in broader, more comedic directions which serves as the source for what little comedy there is to be found here.  

I do appreciate how much effort they put not just into the food (obviously) but also the backgrounds.  They manage to capture the cozy, quiet charm of Yakumo's apartment, as well as some of the more everyday sights around the neighborhood.  It helps to foster the sort of comfortable atmosphere that these sorts of food manga are supposed to foster.

RATING:

Beauty and the Feast is a cozy enough manga to read but I'm worried that it's going to take the idea of "a man's heart in his stomach" to a point it can't walk back from, no matter how many lovingly-made meals it shows off.

This series is published by Square Enix Manga.  This series is complete in Japan with 11 volumes available.  2 volumes have been published and are currently in print.

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