Title: Sweetness and Lightning (Amaama to Inazuma)
Genre: Slice of Life, Food
Publisher: Kodansha (JP), Crunchyroll (US)
Artist/Writer: Gido Amagakure
Serialized in: good! Afternoon
Original Release Date: July 15, 2015
Title: Sweetness and Lightning (Amaama to Inazuma)Crunchyroll is on a roll lately with their manga releases; this series came out in the same wave that gave us The Morose Mononokean (Kiri Wazawa) and Princess Jellyfish (Akiko Higashimura) so it’s really nice to not only have another manga “publisher” at this point but one that puts out such different series! The story, where a widower and his young daughter try to re-work their lives and find solace with an equally lonely young girl, actually reminded me of yet another Crunchyroll series, Father and Son. But where Father and Son aimed for comedy before all else, Sweetness and Lightning goes for a decidedly more bittersweet tone instead.
It’s not clear how long it’s been since Kouhei and Tsumugi lost their wife/mother but while they’ve settled into new routines, Kouhei still finds a lot of things about single parenthood beyond his abilities and this includes cooking. As a bad cook he always appreciated what his wife did, even if he couldn’t always understand why she would spend all day working on something they would eat in minutes, and he really wants to do more cooking because of the bond it gives him with his daughter. Kouhei’s student Kotori is also a poor cook, despite having a loving chef for a mother, and she badgers the two of them into coming to her family’s restaurant and cooking with her since she’s a bit lonely too and between all three of them they can cook up some delicious meals.
This series reminds me quite a bit of a DMG/eManga title Takasugi-San’s Obento (Nozomi Yanahara) in more ways than one. There’s the set-up of using cooking to navigate loss, which admittedly is a theme you find far beyond manga, but there’s the fact that both of these series also have an older (but not much older!) male lead and a school aged girl and frankly it makes me a little uncomfortable. Perhaps the manga-ka truly means for their relationship to be a platonic one but I’m so used to having single, opposite gender characters pair up in manga that I can’t believe the manga-ka wasn’t aware of those implications as well. Plus, Kotori very persistently pursues Kouhei as she tries to convince him to come to her restaurant, knowing he’s her teacher, and always seems extra shy and tongue-tied around him, if they were the same age I would assume this was going to be a romance no questions asked.
Between that awkwardness and the story of the comic itself, honestly I didn’t find the series very engaging. I’ve seen quite a few “man must suddenly raise young child” series and, until I can find a female version of the story and see if that alleviates the tiredness of the sub-genre, honestly my favorite iteration is still the Bunny Drop anime. So far I haven’t found another series that really struck the balance between sweet and funny as well and had actual character growth. In this first volume of Sweetness and Lightning it felt like the story was more content to let the characters stay the same than to start any kind of character development. If you’re looking for a sweet, light story however I do recommend this over Father and Son!
And yes, each chapter comes with the recipe written down in the back so for those who have the cooking equipment to make Japanese dishes, go for it!
