The Summer With You: The Sequel (My Summer of You Volume 3) Review

Wataru Toda and Chiharu Saeki are making plans to spend their third summer together. Chiharu has returned from studying abroad as part of his second-year course at university and Wataru’s still juggling his part-time job at the cinema with university studies. And as first Wataru and then Chiharu celebrate their twentieth birthdays, Wataru’s looking forward to being able to drink alcohol legally at last. However, it soon becomes to clear to Chiharu and his colleagues that Wataru has a very low tolerance level. Despite his protestations to the contrary, he gets drunk after just a glass – so much so that when he goes out with his cinema work colleagues, he soon falls into a deep sleep and they have to call Chiharu to come to the rescue. This leads to Niimi-san, Wataru’s boss at the cinema, witnessing Wataru kissing Chiharu – and eventually asking Chiharu if the two are going out together. Does he have an ulterior motive – or even, maybe, an unexpected and sympathetic insight into their situation?

Chiharu is aware that something has been bothering Wataru for a long while but that Wataru is unable to articulate what it is. Have they reached a crucial moment in their relationship when they can’t move forward together until Wataru recognizes and acknowledges what’s been troubling him?

Nagisa Furuya has a special place in the slice-of-life Boys’ Love category, earned by a distinctive and attractive way of drawing her characters (her style is instantly recognizable) and the realism she brings to her stories about friendships slowly changing and evolving into to relationships. In this third (and final?) volume of My Summer with You, both Chiharu and Wataru officially reach the Japanese age of majority (at the time the manga was being drawn; it dropped to 18 in 2022, even though the legal age for drinking alcohol stayed at 20). But what does this mean in terms of their relationship? They’re both very busy with university studies and jobs on the side – but there’s much that’s still unsaid between the two, even if they’re glad to have some time together over the summer to hang out. So when Wataru – under the influence of alcohol – reveals a very different side to his personality that he’s been hiding from Chiharu all this time – it brings sharply into focus the shifting dynamics in the couple. And Chiharu realizes that something he did to Wataru when they were at high school is still haunting his boyfriend and undermining the progress of their relationship.

As with Volumes 1 and 2, there’s a bonus story at the end in which Wataru and Chiharu go to help out at a traditional inn at the seaside as a favour for a friend and end up staying the night…

It could be argued that, out of the three volumes in this Boys’ Love series, this is the only one that merits the OT rating. However, there’s nothing (very) explicit here as everything is implied and left to the reader’s imagination. The emphasis is very much on the way the two young men’s relationship changes and grows as they become more aware of each other’s feelings and sensitivities. Which makes this – again – a highly  recommendable volume for the LGBT+ section in high school and sixth form libraries.

One feature of Nagisa Furuya’s manga is the way she uses the colour blue to infuse a sense of summer, fine weather and optimism in her readers and this volume continues in the same vein, as do three of the four colour pages at the front.

The translation is, as before, by the excellent (as always) Jocelyne Allen and lettering is expertly done by Nicole Roderick, making this a very smooth read. There’s a page of translation notes and a rather charming 2-page afterword by the mangaka which was originally on the covers of the Japanese edition beneath the dust jacket.

If this volume looks chunkier than usual, it’s because Kodansha have included the first chapter as a preview of Nagisa Furuya’s 2015 oneshot BL My Ultramarine Sky (currently due out in late December 2023). I really like this title (having already read it in French from Hana) and hope to be sharing my thoughts about the US edition here in a few weeks’ time.

Our review copy from Kodansha was supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.