Volume 1 Description: Rave reviews from booksellers across the country!!
The manga about a grandmother discovering beauty that became a hit on Twitter!!
Hanayo has just lost the husband she spent a lifetime with. Yoshiko runs a cosmetics boutique on her own, never having married. Two women who have walked entirely different paths through life — meeting now, in their golden years, drawn to each other, and beginning to truly know one another.
Story
This is a manga about Hanayo, a newly widowed older woman who starts rediscovering herself with the help of her granddaughter and Yoshiko, the owner of a cosmetics store. Volume 1 is just the start of the romance, but it's very wholesome. I really like seeing a story (& esp a queer romance) with an older cast for once, instead of usual highschooler antics.
Difficulty
Parts of this book were too difficult for me, esp since this is the second manga volume I've ever read after チーズスイートホーム. It does not have furigana, all the characters are speaking in kansai-ben (which I had no prior exposure to), and there are a few sections of the book where the characters either speak passionately about cosmetics or abstractly about the titular 花物語 by 吉屋信子 (a Taisho-era collection of short stories which I did not even know existed until I read about it in a different unrelated manga, which actually explained what it was). I had just thought they were talking about a fictional book!
Despite this, I still enjoyed this. It helped that I was reading this as part of an informal WK book club. The majority of the plot doesn't depend on those very difficult bits, although I did miss some backstory about Yoshiko because of it. I also jumped off the deep end with kansai-ben, but I got a decent foundation -- I think I may revisit this in the future when I know more Japanese.