Wagamama Kitchen

Wagamama Kitchen contains the stories of two couples: Takashi and Wakana in the first half of the title, Kumaki and Naoto in the second.

The characters in the first story are a very cute, big-eyed and girlish uke Takashi and a strong, cool, self-restraining seme Wakana. Takashi is a 17-year-old student and in love with his former neighbor Wakana, whom he lost track of several years ago. With some one-frame retrospective drawings the mangaka shows what their former relationship was like; innocent and loving. Takashi finds Wakana again as his teacher. Wakana fears to lose his job, if he encourages Takashi's quite aggressive sexual advances (for example: Takashi dresses up for his lover as a little girl with a mini-skirt and pigtails). So Wakana gives up his defense in the end.

Kumaki meets Naoto when he is called to do maintenance on Naotos copying machine. These two grown-up characters are more similar to each other having the same height, age and figure. They are distinguishable though by face, hair color and behavior. Kumaki is gay and he falls in love with his client. He invites Naoto to his apartment. Naoto up to this point sees Kumaki as a pal and sets off to search for his dirty magazines as soon as he enters the apartment. When he finds gay porn he isn't as shocked as Kumaki feared. Instead he seems quite interested in this subject having experienced a crush on a boy in high school. Very slowly and reluctantly Naoto learns what sex with a man might be like.

The characters are roughly drawn. Even the drawings of the faces seem to be more sketches than actual drawings. Especially Takashi's eye-lashes being carried out in a zigzag fashion was a bit irritating from me. In the sex scenes there is a lot of action left to the imagination. In the second story there are even some chibis involved when Naoto isn't too pleased about what is going on.

The lettering in a handwriting-like type is all right. The printing isn't too thoroughly done; in some pages the print seems to be all over the place but not neatly inside the frames. Sometimes even the pages are cut so badly that the writing is cut away. The covering jacket shows a colored picture of Kumaki and Naoto with the title printed in a lively pastel colors. Why it is called after a food-chain I don't know.

I was quite put off by the first story – it seemed a tad too paedophiliac to me. The second story frustrated me, because the two men admitting their love for each other in the end was a bit surprising – but not in a good way. I didn't like the drawing very much as you might have guessed after reading the description above. And because of all that I wasn't distracted from the poor quality of the printing and cutting.