Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You Volume 7 Review

I did it again… I couldn’t ask. “Are you by any chance… the same person as Miss Yamada?”

Where is Mr. Sasaki? After participating in a alcohol-fuelled midnight race with Yamada/Tayama’s jealous co-worker Kawakami, he’s staying away from the supermarket. Kawakami, feeling bad for having behaved in this way, invites him to meet her behind the store. However, when he eventually turns up, Tayama is there instead. He tries to make a run for it but she catches up to him – and sees that his face is covered in plasters. After face-planting at the end of the race, he went to see the doctor who insisted on patching him up and he’s been too ashamed and embarrassed since then to put in an appearance. They chat as usual about this and that – but the truth is that he’s realized at long last what’s going on and is wondering why she’s continuing with the charade.

So Mr. Sasaki is surprised when Tayama tells him about Suenaga Park that’s really important to her – and is about to be bulldozed. “This park… was kinda like a friend of mine.” They go there because – hangover from a past era – there’s a smoking area and she tells him about hiding out there after problems that she caused eight years ago when she first started to work at the supermarket. Then they have a go on the swings and as they’re swinging together she says, “Mr. Sasaki, I think you’re probably my weirdness.”

Miss Tayama/Yamada is proud of her independence and feels strongly that she should fight her own battles. However, the troublesome male customer who insists on complaining about her, especially after she intervened when he was telling off Miyamoto (a much younger female colleague) is back. While Mr. Sasaki is trying to work out why she’s continuing to live a lie with him and hanging back from confronting her with the truth, she’s undergoing an unpleasant encounter with the aggressive customer in the store who tells her, “If telling you off here isn’t enough for you to understand… I can always scold you at your place.” Even though she tells herself that it’s no big deal and she feels she ought to be able to cope with it, she doesn’t tell her co-workers.

Her older co-worker, the diminutive but wise Ono-san, has a chat with Mr. Sasaki about Miss Yamada when he drops by with a food gift for the store staff. Being older, she’s able to get away with telling him,“You can be by her side in a different way than we co-workers can. You’re a rare bird.” But then Obata comes running up and blurts out that Miss Yamada hasn’t turned up for her daily shift; she’s already an hour late – and nobody can get hold of her! As everyone gathers, worried, Miyamoto, the young till assistant, ventures forward and tells them that she overheard the unpleasant customer threatening Miss Yamada. While they’re all digesting the news, Mr. Sasaki doesn’t hesitate – and hurries away to search for her.

At the time of writing, the TV anime series of Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You is in the early episodes stage. Apart from being highly recommendable (and capturing all that makes the manga such a delightful and humorously melancholic slice-of-life) this also means that anyone reading this might not have caught up with all the manga volumes. We don’t know whether the TV adaptation will go for a ‘proper’ ending or whether it will leave things open-ended as the manga continues.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that, up until now, Mr Sasaki has not grasped that his smoking companion Tayama is one and the same as radiant Miss Yamada, his favourite cashier. He’s come close a couple of times but she’s always managed to steer him in the opposite direction. But in these chapters, he’s realized – but he just hasn’t managed to tell her and is worrying about when to broach the subject and what her reasons might be for playing this game with him. By now, both of them have come to understand that there’s much more going on between them than just hanging out for a companionable smoke together – but issues from their lives are preventing them from committing. In this volume, we get more glimpses of what made Mr. Sasaki move away from the area and what brought him back, six years later. We also get to see him remembering his work mentor and the wise advice he was given. And it seems that just after he moved back to the area, he came to Miss Yamada’s rescue early on when she was being harassed by two men at the supermarket. He really is her knight in shining armour but, of course, he’s embarrassed by his tendency to step in and she’s fiercely proud of her independence and doesn’t want rescuing.

Translation for Square Enix Manga is again by Amanda Haley and, along with the lettering by Kyla Aiko, makes for a smooth and engaging read. The copy has five colour pages at the front (always a nice bonus!) and at the end, there’s an afterword from Jinushi mentioning the upcoming anime. This volume’s Back-Page Cosplay is Diner-Yama and Diner-Saki!

There are plenty of cherishable moments in this volume, some playing to the humorous, silly side of this relationship but also some heart-in-mouth pages and, above all, revealing interactions between Mr. Sasaki and Miss Tayama/Yamada. If you’re rooting for these two, you won’t want to miss any of this as their ‘weird’ (Tayama’s description of Sasaki) friendship evolves and deepens. Volume 8 is due out in November. (Oh – and it’s nice to see Mr. Sasaki with his fringe down; he looks so much younger!)

Our review copy from Square Enix Manga was supplied by Turnaround Comics (Turnaround Publisher Services).