Reviews
(3.33/5)Beginner friendly slice of Tokyo life
Shingo is an overworked company employee trying to balance work and family life. We get humorous, and often tender, episodes from his work and home life. There’s a mixture of one page stories and slightly longer stories.
The story seems to be based on the real recollections of twitter user @shin5mt (shin-go), and many of his real tweets appear in the manga.
This is quite a beginner friendly manga. There’s furigana on all the main text but not in the tweets that appear between chapters. Text density is generally low and the individual episodes are quite short and easy to get through. There’s a Wanikani vocab sheet for volume one.
What I enjoyed most was lots of little insights into Japanese culture, work and home life - e.g. catching the first train of the day home after working an all-nighter in the office, or attending a 飲み会. His affection for his wife and children is a major theme, but not too much to be off putting.
A good 'beginner' manga, but quickly outgrew it
I've actually read this twice, but didn't record the re-read date in my spreadsheet, and both reads pre-date joining Natively. Ah well.
This book is mostly wholesome family comedy. There were a few chapters that had me raising my eye in an "I hope this is comedic license by the author" way, and a workplace creep who is very quickly and properly dealt with, but it's mostly light laughs and heartwarming family life snippets. And on the second read-through, I came to the conclusion that one volume was sufficient, and that it no longer met what I was looking for in my language goals.
The final chapter warrants a note for potentially traumatic content: the pregnancy of the twins is high-risk, and Haru ends up in the hospital fighting for all three of their lives. The reader knows ahead of time that it ends well, but it's still a gut punch, especially if you've been through a similar scenario.
Language learning highlights