The Fall 2022 Manga Guide

Love Nest

What's It About? 

Masato just wants some peace and quiet on his day off, but the kids upstairs continue to make that impossible, so he escapes to his friend Naruse's gay bar. Sympathetic to his ongoing plight, Naruse recommends Masato just move into his second home since he's not using it. But upon his arrival, Masato find a gruff, untidy older man already living there. Does this real-life odd couple stand a chance as roomies... and perhaps something more?

Love Nest has story and art by Yuu Minaduki, with English translation by Christine Dashiell, and SuBLime released its first volume both digitally and physically on September 13.

Note: This title is recommended for readers 18 and over.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Although Love Nest is a companion series to Yuu Minaduki's Sayonara Game and its sequel Change World, you really don't need to have read either of them to enjoy it. Where those two series follow the same couple, this one takes minor character Masato and gives him his own love story, and in all honesty he's such a minor fake-rival character from the other guys' tale that it barely registers that he was in Minaduki's other works. (Likewise, the protagonists from those books make a very brief, negligible appearance here.) The romance subgenre is also fairly different; where the previous two were a second-chance romance, this one is about Masato learning that he's worthy of long-term, committed love and working up to allowing himself to hope for it.

The basic plot is that Masato, who hasn't had a steady boyfriend since he was dumped possibly ten years ago in the most hurtful way, needs to move. His new upstairs neighbors have the world's loudest children, and he can't take it anymore. When his bartender friend Naru offers him a condo to borrow, Masato's too wowed by the pricey electronics to realize that he's going to have to share it with Asahi, an old friend of Naru's. Asahi's nearly as bad as the noisy kids at first; he's a chain-smoking slob whose mess expands to fill all available space. But he's also a kind person struggling with his own heartbreak after divorcing his wife, and as time passes, Masato finds himself falling for the older man. But that's something that he very emphatically doesn't want to do; not only is Asahi straight as far as he knows (there's an implication that he may actually be bi), he doesn't want to risk his heart again on a man who might shatter it.

While Masato's point of view is the primary one and he's the much less inscrutable character, Asahi is clearly carrying around his own burden of pain, and he also seems to find comfort and attraction in his new roommate. He makes a good faith effort to become a better person to share space with, and the slow growth of their relationship makes for rewarding reading. Minaduki has a deft hand with character designs and detailed backgrounds, which also gives this book an edge, and the sex scenes are moderately explicit (visible genitals but limited fluids and no hair). There's a wrench thrown in the works on the last couple of pages, making reading volume two feel very appealing, and even if you missed Minaduki's previous English-language releases, this is a solid choice for your next BL read.