Stuck with a repetitive job and the unwanted attentions of a senpai, office lady Tomoko Hanno’s life is turned around by a minor inconvenience with her bicycle chain. She will thus find out that the cute yet intimidating punk in her neighborhood is none other than Ryohei Takahashi, the owner of the local Takahashi Bike Repair, who will suggest an invitation to dinner in exchange for his services. Despite the differences in their background, age and character, Tomoko and Ryohei will soon realize their mutual attraction, venturing into a relationship marked by both awkward and awesome moments.
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Unlike many slice-of-life manga, Arare Matsumushi‘s “Takahashi from the Bike Shop” is unconcerned with portraying the unnoticed beauty of daily occurrences. Rather than that, it stresses the boredom and sense of purposelessness of an average girl in her late thirties, with a quite humorous and sometimes cynical storytelling, filled with pop culture references testifying the change in tastes of her generation towards American music and TV series.
Missing out on the life achievements of her friends and family back in Tokyo, Tomoko just carries on, not even sure if she should be looking forward to something to happen. In this regard, it is also interesting how the main setting is neither the capital nor some other Japanese metropolis, but the quiet and peripheral city of ogaki in Gifu prefecture – in the Chubu region, whose peaceful surroundings where considered a blessing for mediation and writing by Nobel laureate novelist Yasunari Kawabata.
In doing so, Matsumushi brings irony on a somewhat national level, showing how “small-town life,” often celebrated in the Japanese public discourse in a desperate attempt to halt the depopulation of rural areas, has nothing much to offer except for tasty regional food and Friday night’s drunk. Interestingly enough, though, such depiction has been greatly appreciated by local residents, to the point that the city’s tourism office has adopted the characters from “Takahashi from the Bike Shop” for their advertising campaign since the comic book’s early serialization on digital platform Torch Web. As per how this manga account could be so accurate, while little is known about Matsumushi’s private life, some fans have found out that she actually attended art college not far from Ogaki, thus explaining the mystery behind her familiarity with the area.
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Such fascination of the mangaka for peripheral areas has furtherly been confirmed by her latest work “Ringo no Kuni no Jona,” centered on a girl with an inferiority complex who decides to move to the countryside with her grandma in Aomori prefecture. Indeed, placing ordinary characters in ordinary settings, deploying a graphic style that is intentionally naïve and bare when it comes to human subjects – sometimes reminiscent of Jun Mayuzuki‘s latest works – is what makes Arare Matsumushi’s stories so relatable.
As a result, “Takahashi from the Bike Shop” is a manga that makes its own contribution to redefining beauty and coolness standards as defined by the mainstream, pointing at how romance, even more so when unexpected, can be all about quirks and misunderstandings. And while nothing really seems to happen in idle Ogaki, the first volume still sparks enough interest to see what Tomoko and Ryoōhei will come up with next – and maybe to take a look at the live action adaptation too, starring Nobuyuki Suzuki and Rio Uchida and available on Netflix JP.
