Lady Business

Whoops. In case you hadn't figured it out already, the title of the Yoshinaga manga is actually "What Did You Eat Yesterday?", not "What Did You Eat for Dinner Yesterday?" The English-language publisher is Vertical and the series is apparently still ongoing--they've already released ten or eleven volumes.

You'd probably also like Yoshinaga's "Not Love, But Delicious Foods, Make Me So Happy." (This was published by DMP several years ago, so it may be a bit difficult to get hold of, due to their erratic print runs and habit of letting things go out of print ridiculously quickly.) "Not Love, But Delicious Foods..." is actually a sort of quasi-autobiographical series that some Japanese magazine commissioned as a series of dramatized manga reviews of various Tokyo restaurants. This sounds ridiculously over-specialized, unless you're planning a trip to Tokyo and want tips on Yoshinaga's favorite restaurants. But each review also doubles as a vignette of Yoshinaga (or "Y-naga," as she calls herself in the manga) hanging out with various friends at one of the restaurants in question, discussing stuff like how she and one of her female friends defy food-related Japanese gender expectations by preferring stereotypically male-coded meat dishes to the sweets and desserts that Japanese women and girls are supposed to dote on. This phenomenon is also referenced in Yoshinaga's excellent but technically non-BL series "Antique Bakery," in which Tachibana, one of the four male protagonists, decides to open a fancy bakery/pastry shop and accurately anticipates that the vast majority of the customers will be female. He and the pastry chef he hires, a "gay of demonic charm" who turns out to be an old high school classmate of Tachibana's who disastrously confessed to having a crush on Tachibana right after their graduation ceremony, are both disconcerted when a macho young straight guy shows up and starts begging them to hire him as an apprentice pastry chef. It turns out this guy was a successful welterweight boxer who has just been forced to quit the sport due to potentially blindness-inducing injuries, and the only other thing that interests him anywhere near as much as boxing is cakes and pastries. (The idea of cakes, etc., appealing primarily to women also turns up in a number of non-Yoshinaga shoujo manga where the latest hot patisserie has an all-female line of customers stretching down the street outside the store, occasionally leavened by somebody's embarrassed big brother or boyfriend who's there to pick up the specialty du jour on behalf of a female associate. There's also a brief gag scene riffing on this in one of the later volumes of the shonen title "Assassination Classroom," in which Koro-sensei, the vaguely octopus-like alien[?] who's threatened to blow up the Earth within the year if the class of problem students he teaches at a Japanese high school don't manage to assassinate him first, attempts to indulge his love of sweets by sneaking into what's labeled as a "women-only cake buffet" in drag.)

Anyway, perhaps the highlight of "Not Love, But Delicious Foods..." is the chapter in which Y-naga belatedly finds out that one of the old college friends she's about to have dinner with is gay, and she's apparently the only member of the club they all belonged to back then who'd never realized this, even though she makes her living drawing BL manga. The mortified Y-naga apologizes to her friend for having unwittingly culturally appropriated his experience by writing and drawing BL based mostly on her own imagination, since she'd been under the impression that she didn't actually know any gay men in real life. Luckily for her, the friend seems a lot less bothered by this than she does--possibly because Yoshinaga's gay male characters are among the least stereotyped in the BL genre, despite the fact that she apparently created them less out of research or experience than by speculating about how she might feel if she were a guy in that situation.

Marfisa