The Spring 2025 Manga Guide

The Little Bird Sleeps by the Sea

What's It About? 

Left devastated after the tragic death of his parents and sister, Yuuichi Tachibana adopts his seven-year-old nephew, Ayumu. Seeking a new beginning, he chooses to move them to a new house with a view of the ocean, hoping for a peaceful setting where they can concentrate on their healing.

There they meet Ryou Kurebayashi, who owns a neighborhood deli, and become regular customers. As Ryou and Yuuichi grow closer, learning about each other's unfortunately similarly tragic pasts, they begin to support one another ― and Ayumu ― day by day, building a little family of their own by the sea.

The Little Bird Sleeps By The Sea has a story and art by Yuu Minaduki. English translation by Christine Dashiell. This volume is lettered by Vibrant Publishing Studio. Published by Tokyopop (April 21, 2025). Rated OT.

Content warning: Suicide.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

If there's one thing queer narratives do particularly well, it's found family stories, at least in my experience. Yuu Minaduki's The Little Bird Sleeps By The Sea is an excellent example of the type. The story follows Yuuichi, who adopts his young nephew Ayumu after the rest of the immediate family is killed in a car accident. Yuuichi isn't entirely sure how to be a father to the grieving seven-year-old, and one of his first decisions is to move them both to a new place, a small town by the sea, to give them a fresh start. There they meet Ryou, a host-turned-deli-owner who is carrying his own griefs with him, and the three of them begin to depend upon each other in ways they don't fully understand, all seeking comfort and stability in a world that no longer offers them either.

The ocean itself and the town play a role as characters, too, which helps to ground and deepen the story. While Yuuichi and Ayumu have just moved there, Ryou is from there, which is a bit of a double-edged emotional sword for him. It's both a marker of his success and failures, and part of what draws him to Yuuichi and his nephew is the opportunity to help someone else out of their own darkness. In some ways Ryou and Ayumu are analogous characters, with both afraid to be left behind but neither sure how to express that – and Yuuichi isn't emotionally intelligent enough yet to fully understand what they're asking of him. Their journeys are parallel but not the same, although eventually the three lines defy the definition of “parallel” to allow them to meet at their shared destination.

One of the threads that runs through the book is collecting sea glass, and how the ocean can take garbage and transform it into something beautiful. Although Ryou can't see it, that's what his trajectory is: he's being smoothed and reshaped through his relationship with Yuuichi and Ayumu. Collecting sea glass, something important to both Ryou and Ayumu, becomes a symbolic element that shows how they're able to change over time, and holding onto the found pieces illustrate their desire to move forward, as if they're collecting pieces of themselves.

The romance is, of course, also central to the story, and as always Yuu Minaduki does a lovely job; I've enjoyed everything that's been released in English from the creator. Sex scenes aren't terribly graphic and there's more an emphasis on how it helps Ryou and Yuuichi relate to each other than anything more prurient. The Little Bird Sleeps By The Sea is a heartfelt volume, although it does come with a content warning for suicide, and a very good book.

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Lauren Orsini
Rating:

Sometimes you need more than love, you need therapy. In The Little Bird Sleeps By The Sea, all three main characters need a whole lot of it. The story stars Yuichi, a man taking care of his nephew Ayumu after his sister and parents all die; and Ryo, the handsome but troubled deli owner they befriend in their new town. These characters quickly gravitate toward one another as they lick their wounds, but the two adults seem hardly more mature than the child they'reattempting to care for. I was drawn to this title when I saw that it was a BL “found family” trope story, but I was put off by the emotional immaturity of its adult main characters.

In this classic “somebody comes to town” plot, Yuichi and his nephew Ayumu move to the seashore to start a new life. Stomachs rumbling, the very first person they meet is the local deli owner who seems too handsome to be true. Ryo immediately puts the moves on Yuichi, but their collective trauma means their love story isn't so simple. Between pensive trips to the seaside and Ayumu's challenges making friends at his new school, these guys struggle to do the most basic introspection. Ryo has some serious emotional hangups resulting from his good looks and his troubled past (content warning for incest) while Yuichi insists he's not gay. All the walls come down when Ryo shows up injured and incapacitated at Yuichi and Ayumu's front door. But why did it have to come to that? Even though the story results in a happy ending, it doesn't seem like a very safe or stable environment for a kid when his parents talk like brooding teenagers instead of the adults they should be.

For some readers, the pull of the queer found-family trope will be strong enough to shake off any other concerns this narrative might have. Its handsome characters and somber seaside backdrops make it easy on the eyes. But both of these guys are suffering from severe PTSD and that's not something that getting your feelings requited will easily cure.