7 Mouthwatering Manga About Food

In manga, as in other literature, food and emotion are often intertwined. Fruits Basket takes its name from a children’s game in which each player is assigned the name of a fruit. When the heroine, Tohru Honda, plays in kindergarten, her classmates prank her, naming her “rice ball.” Tohru doesn’t think much of it at first, because she likes rice balls, but of course, she is excluded from the game because there is no rice ball in a fruit basket. She goes through life seeing herself as an outsider, until she turns the metaphor around when she tells a friend, “If a person’s greatest quality is like a pickled plum in a rice ball, that ‘plum’ might be stuck on the back side.” In other words, others may be able to see qualities we ourselves are not aware of—and maybe we’re all rice balls.

At the other end of the medium, food plays a curiously important role in Tokyo Ghoul. Most of the characters are creatures who can’t digest ordinary foods and must eat human flesh to survive. Wen the lead character, Ken Kaneki, becomes a ghoul, one of the things he misses most is chowing down on hamburgers with his best friend. Ken doesn’t just get turned off by regular food, he describes his loathing in detail: “The miso soup tastes like machine oil. The texture of the tofu feels like a glob of lard. The rice feels like I’m kneading glue in my mouth.” Hardass waitress Touka, on the other hand, tries very hard to eat human food to cement the bond of friendship with one of her classmates. Since the one food ghouls can digest is coffee, the manga is set at a coffeehouse, where there is much discussion of the qualities of a good cup of coffee.
In manga that take food as their primary subject, the emphasis is often more analytical, with characters discussing at length the proper qualities of a dish and the one unexpected trick for preparing it just so. The emotional component is still there, but it’s mixed up with serious foodie talk. Here’s a look at seven food-focused manga that will get your mouth watering.

Oishinbo, by Tetsu Kariya
To celebrate its 100th anniversary, a newspaper assigns reporter Shirō Yamaoka to assemble the ultimate Japanese meal, a task that requires him to travel the country and eat all kinds of delicious foods, in locales than range from fancy restaurants to humble country inns. This premise may seem laughably simple, but writer Tetsu Kariya and artist Akira Hanasaki have kept it running since 1983, give or take a few hiatuses, piling up 111 volumes so far. This isn’t just a series of restaurant reviews, it’s a story of alienation and revenge: Yamaoka is bitterly estranged from his father, Kaibara Yūzan, a renowned potter and the founder of a gourmet club, or rather, The Gourmet Club. Somehow, they get thrown together a lot, and each shared meal becomes a battle of the palates, with victory hinging on some very subtle point. Yamaoka, who seldom shows much emotion, baits his father, questioning whether a particular dish is as good as it’s supposed to be. Yūzan blows up, battle lines are drawn, and each story ends with a big reveal, as Yamaoka explains the missing ingredient or technique, and a proper dish is served up, to everyone’s contentment. It’s a little bit Cooks Illustrated, a little bit Encyclopedia Brown. If you don’t read Japanese, though, you’re just getting an amuse-bouche; Viz has published seven volumes, each grouped around a theme (pub food, fish, rice), so it’s sort of a greatest hits collection, or a tasting menu, if you will. The stories are out of sequence, so the blandly pleasant Yūko Kurita is Yamaoka’s assistant in some, and his wife in others, but it really doesn’t matter: each of them stands alone, and the real pleasure is in the intense discussion of each dish—and the big reveal at the end.

Food Wars, by Yuto Tsukudo
Somo Yukihura used to help out in his father’s restaurant, until the day his father disappeared and Somo wound up in an elite school for would-be chefs. This series has a huge cast, and each student has a different background and set of talents. The school constantly pits them against one another in cooking competitions, and the range of variations that Tsukudo comes up with is truly amazing. Even more amazing is the visual effect that indicates a successful dish: when a taster really enjoys a particular food, their clothes fly off. This happens to lovely young girls and grizzly old men alike, and it’s a cute jab at the excesses of food writing. At the same time, the characters discuss cooking techniques and taste combinations with as the same earnestness as the professional foodies in Oishinbo. They just look a lot better doing it.

The Drops of God, by Tadashi Agi and Shu Akimoto
What Oishinbo does for food, The Drops of God does for wine, but this time the rivalry is between the son of a famed wine connoisseur and his father’s protégé. Shizuku Kanzaki hates his wine-critic father Yutaka Kanzaki so much that not only has he never had a drop of wine, he went to work for a beer distributor. When the elder Kanzaki dies, Shizuku discovers that his father recently adopted the up-and-coming critic Issei Tomine. Under the terms of Yutaka’s will, only one of the two young men can inherit his priceless collection of rare wines—and the heir will be determined by a wine-tasting contest. The Drops of God was so popular in Japan it actually affected the wine market in noticeable ways. Vertical has published five of its 44 volumes in English: a four-volume story arc that kicks off the series and the one-shot The Drops of God: New World, which focuses on American and Australian wines.

What Did You Eat Yesterday? by Fumi Yoshinaga
Food can convey love as well as hate, but even then, the messages can be complicated. Shiro and Kenji are a middle-aged gay couple who live together in Tokyo. Shiro is a lawyer who worries constantly about money, his weight, and what people think of him. Kenji, a hairdresser, is more easygoing. Shiro cooks dinner every night, keeping up a running narrative of what he is doing as he does, so parts of this manga read like illustrated recipes. But that’s only part of it: the dynamics of their relationship are slowly revealed, not just in Shiro and Kenji’s dinner conversations, but in the meals they have with others, and even during Shiro’s shopping trips. Fumi Yoshinaga is a serious eater herself; another of her food-focused manga is Not Love But Delicious Foods, and her Antique Bakery is a workplace soap opera decorated with lovely pastries.

Sweetness and Lightning, by Gido Amagakure
Three lonely people cook and eat together. That’s a pretty basic framework for a story, but Gido Amagakure tosses in some twists—and once again, focuses on getting the dish just right. Kouhei Inuzuka is a widowed math teacher with little time to cook for himself or his young daughter Tsumugi, so he gives her fast food and doesn’t eat much himself. Kotori Iida, one of his students, is the daughter of a celebrity chef who owns a restaurant but is never there. Kouhei and Kotori start getting together to cook meals in the deserted restaurant, but Kotori doesn’t know how to cook at all and is terrified of knives. Fortunately, her mother leaves her illustrated recipes, and Kouhei is willing to take on the knife work. While nobody’s clothes dissolve, the emotions are always tuned to a high key, with lots of blushing, sweating, yelling, and crying as the characters bumble through the recipes—and weep with joy when they come out just right.

Yakitate!! Japan, by Takashi Hashiguchi
Azuma Kazuma has an ambition: he wants to create the national bread of Japan, and he refuses to be steered away by all the people who keep telling him that the Japanese eat rice, not bread. Yakitate!! Japan takes the classic tropes of shonen manga and applies them to baking bread. Azuma, who is gifted with “Hands of the Sun” (warm hands that help him make the bread rise), goes to Tokyo to hone his craft at Pantasia, a bakery chain, but of course, there are competitions to get through first. Like Food Wars, this series is made particularly enjoyable by the many different twists the creator puts on a common dish, as Azuma and the other characters try to outdo each other with their creativity and technique.

Kitchen Princess, by Natsume Ando
Natsume Ando’s tale of a sweet girl with perfect taste buds is seriously shoujo: Najika, a cheery orphan, gets herself into an elite academy for teens with special talents because (wait for it!) the boy who comforted her, and saved her from drowning, after her mother died gave her a flan to cheer her up, and the spoon he left with her was unique to that school. Of course, the other students are mean to her, because they don’t think her talent is so special, but she wins them over and solves all their problems with her delicious cooking. In the sort of situation that only happens in shoujo manga (one hopes!), the director of the school is a hot young man who falls in love with Najika—as does his brother, a student at the school. The series has a bit of bite to it, with some mean girls and a shocking plot twist, but overall, it’s a pretty sweet shoujo soap opera.