Manga – Sweetness and Lightning // Review.

Sweetness and Lightning written by Gido Amagakure is a simple work that perhaps suffers from its length for what it has to offer.

Consisting of 56 chapters of considerable length – 30+ pages per chapter – the manga goes on at great length without developing its potential, perhaps not wanting to disappoint its mainly family audience.

Suppose someone is seeking a romance between the irreverent and friendly Iida Kotori and her professor Kouhei Inuzuka. In that case, they will be disappointed here because the author makes zero effort to develop a romance between the two that is never explored. After all, it is not the main focus of the work.

Sweetness and Lightning shares the following message at its core: The beauty of eating together.

The recently widowed Professor Kouhei takes care of his daughter (I think 5 years old), living an intense and breathless life between work and paternal responsibilities, failing in the culinary department where our two live on pre-cooked foods bought at the Combini, with a classic card game of life, by chance they meet Iida Kotori, an avid eater and food lover, a student of Kouhei and daughter of a renowned chef who, like our protagonist, does not know how to cook properly.

From that moment the manga enters a solid loop for over (and maybe too many) 56 chapters where the first part lives on a slice-of-life setup and, in the second our people start cooking, initially making messes and then finishing happily enjoying delicacies.

At first glance, it might seem that the protagonists are Kouhei and Kotori, but after a thorough reading, we understand that the queen of the manga is Tsumugi. The author managed to instil and justify the girl’s age with all its dramas, expectations and appropriate reactions with excellent realism.

I, who has a daughter at that age (and who spends a lot of time with me), have noticed the similarities, whether these are innocence, watching a cartoon, arguments between classmates in kindergarten and open hatred for certain foods. As a dad, I took notes both on the food but also on indications that the author gave us on how to deal with certain situations.

Tsumugi is also the one who “ages”.

An underlying problem with the manga is how it handles its temporal side.

Going by deduction we can conclude that at the beginning of the story, Tsugumi is 5 years old, Kotori is 16 and Kohei is around 26. The story spans almost 14 years, thus seeing the “romance” duo around 30 and 40, and here the problems of this manga begin to emerge. Kouhei and Kotori over those 14 years not only do not age a day but their interaction has never changed a millimetre, making the time passage quite useless for them but fundamental for Tsugumi who – as mentioned – can be considered the protagonist.

Tsumugi and her father are so beautiful that you get “diabetes”, there are many significant passages from an adult’s point of view that then make this manga one of a kind because seeing the point of view of a father and making it so adult without falling into “weirdness” (we now Japanese artists may take weird concepts) is however rare in the manga world where plots about fathers being fathers are very few according to my memory.

As for the food, this manga is a continuous feast. Overmerely read all the ingredients and procedures and then you would like to apply them, be it with your friends or in my case with your child.

Closing note dedicated to the characters of Shinobu (Kotori’s friend) and Yagi (Kouhei’s friend), who seem to be the only ones to maintain a continuous love tension throughout the manga, even in their case nothing happens, but at least there are some romantic passages.

But this is not a romantic manga, it is an entertaining family manga to read in the evening perhaps before dinner, one or two chapters.