[ book review ] Confessions of a Shy Baker Volume 1 by Masaomi Ito
Book: Confessions of a Shy Baker Volume 1
Author: Masaomi Ito
Genre: adult, contemporary romance, slice-of-life, manga
Format: Digital.
Was it an ARC/gifted copy? No.
SYNOPSIS:
Toshimitsu Yamamura, who runs a real estate business, and Genta Tsubakisaka, a caregiver, live together contentedly. In his spare time, Toshimitsu loves baking and making candies, and coincidentally, Gonta loves eating them! While their day-to-day lives might be full of difficulties and stresses, the time they spend together at their home café is a sweet treat.
Content Warnings: diet culture, fatphobia, calorie-counting and obsession, body shaming, biphobia, fetishization of gay men, gay stereotypes, internalized homophobia, sexual harassment, joking about sexual harassment, transphobia.
RATING: 1 star
REVIEW:
Ah… where do I even start with this one…
When I started reading I wanted to rate this manga high because the fixation on baking as a love language and the couple were both extremely cute (this cuteness died down quickly), but there was such an obsession with calories and weight, which was literally repeated every other page, that it got very triggering, despite me not usually getting triggered by stuff like this. It seems the MC’s boyfriend is trying to lose weight (it’s not really specified if it’s because he wants to or if he needs to for medical reasons) and the MC is always changing his recipes to make them healthier and lower in calories which alone would not have been a problem and could even be seen as a loving thing to take care of his boyfriend, but every time he feeds him he always mentions the calories and how his food is “healthier” and that his boyfriend needs to lose weight and eat less. It’s like the MC is more obsessed with his boyfriend’s weight than he is, controlling everything he eats and never letting him breathe. There’s even a scene in which, as soon as they get in the car after eating at a restaurant, he YELLS at his boyfriend for eating more noodles than him. What the fuck.
He babies his boyfriend a lot, both for the weight thing and for other stuff. For example, when he takes in his aunt’s dog because she went into a care facility, he has to literally scold his boyfriend telling him they can’t have a dog because it’s a big responsibility and blah blah blah, basically making it sound like his boyfriend is not capable of taking care of any living thing, himself included. Reading those pages felt like a father talking to his son.
There is one scene with the MC’s boyfriend, when he goes to work and his coworker tells him their boss no longer works there. When she explained the reason he misunderstood it as the former boss having harassed multiple coworkers (and she realized he misunderstood but she kept fueling his belief because apparently joking about sexual harassment is funny), and he was genuinely like “it’s not a big deal” and “it can’t be true”, plus he was fantasizing about the boss as she spoke and imagining him in the situation, and when she mentioned that he approached a male coworker as well, his only concern what that the boss had never approached him to flirt/sexually harass him and he took that as an insult to his attractiveness and desirability.
The MC has both internalized homophobia and a big fear of coming out due to possible (and probable) discrimination. This obviously is reflected in anything he does and says during the story. I know that there’s many more volumes to this manga, and I don’t think I’ll continue reading it, but I hope the author will address this at some point.
I need straight women to stay away from the LGBT community, ASAP. The rage I feel any time straight women try to infiltrate themselves into queer spaces because they fetishize gay men is astronomical. I’m glad that the story went with the approach of trying to guide the MC’s coworker to educate herself, but no matter how many meetings she attends, her attitude won’t change.
At some point there’s the annoying line, “then there are asexual people, who may not experience sexual or romantic attraction at all,” conflating asexuality and aromanticism together as the same thing. The author was clearly trying to be more inclusive by trying to mention all the other identities of the LGBT community and not just focus on gay men, but they failed miserably (we see it with the asexual line, with the casual biphobia, with the weird comments about crossdressers, and with the gay caricatures and multiple walking stereotypes).
Towards the end they meet the boyfriend of a friend, who mentions being divorced with a kid (giving, at that moment, no other context) and the MC immediately goes “he identified as a straight man until now”… yay to casual biphobia (/s). At least the guy tells them immediately after that he might be bi or gay (he’s still unsure), but the MC’s assumption is still there.
And last but not least, the story was boring. I love slice-of-life, but if you have nothing else to keep you interested (like, you know…. likable characters), then it’s just flat.
