When erotic novelist Enomura Haruka and shojo artist Nakata Miruku are brought together by their publisher to collaborate on a new manga, it seems like a perfect match—until the two meet in person and realize just how different they are! Haruka is a bit of a sadist with a cool-guy personality, and he immediately clashes with Miruku, who's something of a masochist and doesn't match his bright shojo style at all. There's one thing the two have in common, however—their love of gourmet food, especially the mail-order variety. Can their passion for amazing food bridge the gap between them? Or could food be the catalyst that causes their passions to boil over?

Sensei's Mail-Order Food has a story by Yuuri Eda and art by Asumiko Nakamura. English translation is done by Richard Tobin and Andria McKnight, lettered by Aly Villanueva. Published by Seven Seas. (October 14, 2025).

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Color me disappointed. I generally really enjoy Asumiko Nakamura's work no matter what genre she's creating in, and I also like it when a work combines two styles – in this case, Sensei's Mail-Order Food is both manga and light novel in alternating chapters. (There are many more pages of the light novel part, hence its inclusion here.) But there's something that just doesn't work in this title, making it hard to recommend even though I very much wish it were otherwise.

The story follows two men, one an erotica author and the other a manga creator. Their paths cross when their editors decide that they ought to collaborate on a series, with Enomura writing the script and Nakata drawing the manga. But sparks of the wrong sort immediately fly when Enomura realizes that Nakata is a man with a beard and not the buxom young woman of his author portrait, immediately sending the story in the direction of Enomura being the sort of person who's loud even in a silent medium. He's also obnoxiously obsessed with large breasts, something that leaves Nakata cold because he grew up in a family of well-endowed women. Thus big boobs become the major gag of the series, something which Nakamura does her best to capitalize on in the art. It's a case where I can tell it's meant to be funny, but it just doesn't work for me.

But where does the title figure into all of this? Both Nakata and Enomura, as busy people chained to their desks all day, delight in ordering food by mail. This is by far the most interesting aspect of the book, as it allows both Nakamura and Eda to wax eloquent about real foods that can be mail ordered in Japan – they use their favorites in each chapter, and at the end is an information sheet about the foods and where you can order them. (No word on if they're internationally available; for a few, I'm tempted to try.) The foodie segments are filled with the usual over description that makes the genre fun, with a few bonus foodgasms to round things out.

Although the two men do grow closer, I'd really classify this as more of a bromance than a BL story. Yes, they wake up in bed together at the end, but there's not real implication they're doing anything but sleeping, nor do they have that kind of chemistry. They do become friends, however, and towards the end of the book it's clear that they do care about each other, particularly in a chapter about the death of Nakata's great-grandmother. But this is overall just too mixed to be great in any one of its aspects. It's not terrible, but it's also not a book I'd wholeheartedly recommend…although maybe it's better if you don't go in expecting anything beyond food and boobs.

Erica Friedman
Rating:

To be blunt, I am giving this collection 1 star because this was the single most disappointing thing I have read in a long time. I'm a huge fan of Nakamura's work, a huge fan of food-obsession stories, and I even have a soft spot in my heart for BL centered around food. I was sincerely looking forward to this volume, but it did not work. For someone who is not me, it might be the exact right mix of personality gap, two normal guys, and food BL.

It was never a relationship that gelled over the course of the tale. Anyone old enough to remember the television show from the 70s, The Odd Couple, will understand when I say that this book felt like a BL starring Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. Neither character is someone you like, but you're kind of glad that they both have each other to drive crazy. And food. The food looked and sounded great. I love manga that highlights restaurants, patisseries, and sweets shops, with real items that readers can then go buy (if one lives in Japan, at least). But the characters here gave me such a stomachache that I could barely swallow any given chapter.

Enomura's obsession with breasts was just plain creepy, and overall, his personality was deeply unlikable. Like, my dudes, I am a lesbian, I like women's bodies plenty, but that level of fetishtry is just plain pathological. It screams one of two things— creep, stay away, or super closeted gay, also stay away. I get that this was the joke, and I'm sure some readers found it very heartwarming and funny. For me, it made the story unpalatable.

The best bits were Enomura's stressing out about writing assignments. Anyone who knows that feeling when you get the email that something you can't remember having agreed to write was due last week would feel that same way. Yummy food helps.