All of us reach our breaking point eventually. For Chako, it's one big thing that pushes her towards it, and more of the realization that her life in the place she's moved to isn't quite what she's looking for. In her case, that would be the big city of Tokyo, where she moved after leaving her family's tea farm following her parents' deaths. Rather than be a tea farmer, she has become a fitness instructor, and by the time we join the story, she has realized that the built-in sexism that comes with the job isn't something she needs to put up with. It is, however, something all around her, and when she thinks about it, she understands how pervasive it is. It's mainly in the form of little snide comments that men make in her hearing - remarks about how women must have it easier because they can use their purported female fragility as an excuse at any time or how their beauty makes people treat them better. It all comes crashing down on her like an avalanche when she puts those pieces together with the environment of her fiancé's family: meeting his mother and watching her do things like wipe her husband's bare feet when he comes home from work drives home to Chako just how very much she doesn't want this.

In an unusually realistic nod for romance manga, it isn't necessarily easy for her to break away from the life she's built for herself in Tokyo. This isn't because she's afraid she'll appear like she's given up or because she has solid friendships that she doesn't want to leave behind in the city; it's because her fiancé is possessive to a fault, and he believes that their engagement means that she belongs to him. Although the creator of the book does not spend too much time going over what he does to her, we get enough of an idea from small panels showing us a succession of restraining orders that she has taken out against him, letting us know very clearly but without melodrama precisely what he has done to her life. Chako's decision to return to the family tea farm is less a marker of her giving up and more a desperate bid for safety in a community where she is known and hopefully better understood.

But as anyone can tell you, coming home doesn't always mean returning to an unchanged world. While Chako left the farm following her parents' deaths, a piece of her probably expected everything to be pretty much as she'd left it, with her brother in charge and the farm chugging along. She is shocked when she walks in the door and finds a little girl wreaking havoc in the kitchen sink. Not only was she unaware that her brother had married, but she also had no idea that he had since been widowed and had a small child. As you might guess, that would be who is in the sink: her niece Futaba. She is floored when it is not her brother who walks in the door but a man she's never seen or heard of before. He tells her his name is Isshin, and her brother is out in the shed in the back, attempting to live out his creative dreams. While we don't know exactly what her brother's doing, it is clear that he is either writing a novel, creating manga, or something similar, which we can infer from his worries about his deadline. Why the brother and sister haven't been in communication since she left the farm is not explored in this volume, and at this point, it feels more like Chako's brother exists simply as a catalyst to create Futaba. That's not terrific plotting, but it still allows for the story to have a precocious small child character without making her Isshin or Chako's kid, which is at least a little different than we've seen in most cases.

Running away from her problems doesn't work out quite as smoothly as Chako had hoped. As the multiple restraining orders attest, her fiancé does not necessarily pay attention to people who tell him to stop doing something. Naturally, he chases her out to the family farm. In a desperate bid to get rid of him, Chako jumps onto the tractor Isshin is riding and declares that she and he are married. Although surprised, he is smart enough to go along with it and take care of the whole pesky fiancé issue, but if you've ever lived in a small town, you know that their farce is unlikely to end there. Suddenly the entire neighborhood is fully aware of Chako and Isshin's supposed relationship, and the two are stuck with it. It's not what you would call romantic, but it offers a good foundation for the manga to build a romance plot.

This is partly due to Futaba's wholehearted embrace of the two most consistent adult presences in her life. We don't know precisely when her mother died, but given that she isn't more than five years old, she doesn't have a whole lot of memories of her period with her father's embarkation on his creative career. We get the distinct impression that Isshin has mostly raised her, and the discovery that she has an aunt is fascinating for the little girl. The story does make an effort not to make her too terribly precocious, which helps. Instead, her love for Isshin allows us to see that underneath his gruff exterior, there's probably a heart of, if not gold, at least something goldish.

Matcha Made in Heaven is not off to the strongest start. Isshin's not particularly easy to like, and there's a bit more of a sense that he and Chako are stuck with each other than that they're building anything solid together. But she's coming from a place that is believable emotionally, and the frank acknowledgment of the issues she's been facing feels like something we don't see often enough in manga. This looks like a series worth giving a chance because it has potential, if nothing else.