The Winter 2021 Manga Guide

Restart After Coming Back Home

What's It About? 

Hotheaded Kozuka Mitsuomi left his home in the country for a sophisticated life in Tokyo. Unfortunately, at age 25, he's fired from his job and returns home in disgrace. As he tries to rediscover himself, he meets Kumai Yamato, a man about his age who was adopted into his community while Mitsuomi was away. The sweet and even-tempered Yamato is hiding his own pain, and as the two men connect, they start a journey together.

Restart After Coming Back Home is an original manga by cocomi. Seven Seas Entertainment has released the first volume of the manga both digitally and physically for $14.99.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

In the afterword, creator cocomi says that this manga was written with the goal of showing a relationship where both partners had something that the other lacked. I think that's as good a description as any for this book, which is very much about what it means to “come home” and how people do that. The literal meaning of the title comes from Mitsuomi, who has just returned to his rural hometown after ten years in Tokyo. He left in high school for reasons that aren't ever explicitly stated but come across clearly nonetheless: as the youngest of three brothers, he was the butt of his siblings' jokes or at their beck and call in ways that made him feel badly about himself and resent them. His parents, although loving, didn't quite understand him, and Mitsuomi left because he needed a place where he could simply start over. Unfortunately for him, after being fired from his job in the city, he had no other option but to return.

Meanwhile Yamato moved to the rural town around the same time Mitsuomi left it. An orphan raised in group homes, Yamato has always felt lacking in how he relates to other people. Even though he was adopted by an older couple who are demonstrative in their own, peculiarly rural way (if you've ever lived in small town New England, you'll know what I'm talking about), he worries that he spent too long without a family to ever really understand how to love someone. Despite that, he's been forming a tendre for Mitsuomi for most of those ten years before they meet face-to-face – Mitsuomi's parents are friends and neighbors of Yamato's new grandparents, and he spends a lot of time talking to Mitsuomi's mom and looking at family photos. As he tells Mitsuomi, he felt like he knew him for years. The crux of the story is how these two young men manage to form a relationship and to admit to themselves and each other that they really want it to work. Yamato is so scared that he can't love that he barely recognizes that he's been in love with Mitsuomi for a long time, while Mitsuomi is focused on managing to get out from under his past, which included telling his father that he'd never take over the family store (a Buddhist supply shop) because kids used to tease him for smelling like incense. We can see a lot of Mitsuomi's own stubbornness and poor communication skills in his father, who can't get past words Mitsuomi spoke when he was in middle or elementary school; his son has to really work to get him to believe him. But wanting to be with Yamato is part of what gives him the strength to say the words in the first place, just as wanting to be with Mitsuomi is what makes Yamato start to look into his past and how it affected his present.

Simply put, this is a sweet story. It's warm, rewarding, and gentle, and if it could have been longer to develop the characters more, that's not really a reason not to pick it up as it is.