The four-volume manga Antique Bakery, by Fumi Yoshinaga, is not the kind of thing I usually read, because by Western genre standards, it’s mainstream: four guys running a bakery and living their lives. (By Japanese genre standards, it’s shojo (aimed at female teenagers), though apparently its U.S. publisher is strongly associated with a different genre and markets it as such.) However, I saw the first volume in our local library and remembered that Micole had spoken well of it, so decided to give it a try.
I quite enjoyed this. It got over my mainstream aversion by being a how-things-work story, where the “thing” is a successful patisserie. There is a lot of loving detail about baking, and building up a business, and did I mention baking? Fair warning: this is a bad thing to read when one is either hungry or has been unable to eat chocolate for several months. (I miss chocolate.)
Anyway, four guys working in a patisserie. They’re all more complicated than they appear at first—not with Saiyuki-grade angst, but with pleasing amounts of depth. There is something like a plot, too, in among the side stories about the customers, which to my appreciation was not as neat and tidy as it could have been. I like the way the story keeps reaching back to prior events, expanding the reader’s understanding and moving the characters forward each time, through to the end. It’s quietly humane, often funny, and on the whole was a not-too-fluffy, not-too-heavy way to spend a couple of afternoons.
The art is clean and fairly spare when it comes to the characters, but detailed and as mouth-watering as black and white can be when it comes to the food. (The dust jackets are scratch-and-sniff, which I thought was just weird.) The page layouts are generally uncomplicated, andI found the overall effect was of lightness. My only complaint is that flashbacks were often not visually signaled, causing me to be briefly confused on several occasions, particularly in the third volume.