Mixed Vegetables Vol. #1
© Viz Media

Mania Grade: B+
Art Rating: B+
Packaging Rating: B+
Text/Translation: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Viz Media
MSRP: 8.99
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9781421519678
Size: B6
Orientation: Right to Left

Related Links

0

Mixed Vegetables Vol. #1

The only daughter of a pastry shop owner schemes to get out of the family business and realize her dream of becoming a sushi chef by marrying the son of a sushi shop.

Creative Talent:
Writer/Artist: Ayumi Komura
Translator: JN Productions
Adaptation: Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic

What They Say:
Hanayu Ashitaba is the daughter of the celebrated Patisserie Ashitaba, but all she wants to do is be a sushi chef. Hayato Hyuga is the son of the prestigious Sushi Hyuga, and all he want to do is be a pastry chef! It's love and leftovers in the Oikawa High School Cooking Department as these star-crossed gourmands do their best to reach their cuisine dreams!

What We Say:

Packaging:
A colorful illustration takes up the entirety of the front cover.  It's very pretty, but the scene is a little strange looking.  It features Hayato and Hanayu wearing kimono in a Japanese-style room overlooking a garden.  Hanayu is very pretty in her ornate red kimono and obi, and Hayato wears a plain green kimono.  What makes this scene strange is that there is a red fish on a tray sitting before Hanayu, Hayato is brandishing a knife, and both characters look rather intense.  (You're not quite sure if he's going to slice the fish or her...)  At the top left corner is the publisher's logo.  The title logo, in plain red and green text, is towards the right at the top of the cover. Author's credits are placed to the lower left in red with a red border below.

To the right of the back cover is an illustration of Hayato in the same green kimono holding the red fish (now sliced) on a plate.  He stands against a beige background with a katakana character pattern on it (from my limited Japanese skills, the characters appear to be the ones that would phonetically make up the words "Mixed Vegetables"). The Shojo Beat logo is at the very top, followed by the title logo.  Beside the illustration is a brief story summary in black text, and at the very bottom are printing orientation, rating, and publisher's icons.

The print quality is clean, and binding and materials are satisfactory. Extras are comprised of six Side Dishes (one-page mangaka remarks in manga form embedded in the story), a three-page bonus manga, two pages of endnotes explaining the foods mentioned in the story, a one-page author profile, and ads for other Viz releases.

Artwork:
Mixed Vegetables contains cleanly drawn shojo style artwork.  Character designs are pleasant to look at and have expressive eyes. The girls faces tend to look the same, but Hanayu is easy to pick out because she's the one character with dark hair.  The cast have a tendency to have extreme reactions, and the mangaka uses simplified/distorted faces for those scenes. 

There are actually not a whole lot of food images in this manga.  The food that shows up most in Volume 1 is sliced cucumbers.  However, the few drawings that they have of fish and pastries are pretty and meticulous.  Hand-drawn backdrops of classroom and home scenes tend to be simple and rather minimal, but the mangaka makes good use of tones for effect without overpowering the reader.

Text/Translation:
Viz has again done an excellent job with the text in this Shojo Beat title.  All signs, books, papers etc. are replaced with overlays in lettering styles compatible with the original Japanese feel. All the original Japanese sound effects are replaced with English sound effects that capture the flavor of the original. 

Translation of the manga dialogue is satisfactory for the most part.  They use the term "sushi shop" instead of "sushi restaurant," which is more of a direct translation of the Japanese but might sound a little odd for American readers. However, in Side Dish 4, the text in one of the panels is really confusing, and it looks as if Viz might have goofed up on the editing job there. A nice variety of fonts are used throughout the text.  Most honorifics have been dropped, but they do refer to their teacher as Matsuzaka Sensei.

Content:
Hanayu Ashitaba is obsessed with fish.  Every time she sees one, she gets the urge to slice it.  And so she naturally dreams of becoming a sushi chef.  There's just one problem.  She's the only daughter of the owner of a pastry shop, and she doesn't want to hurt her parents by telling them she doesn't want to take over the family business.

However, she comes up with a solution!  She'll simply marry into a sushi family!  That way her family will have to understand her decision to work with fish instead of pastry dough.  And conveniently enough, her fellow classmate Hayato Hyuga at Oikawa High School Cooking Department is the son of a sushi chef so Hanayu resolves to marry him!

Hanayu makes every effort to show off her sushi skills in class so that Hayato will see just how helpful she can be for his family's sushi shop.  And amazingly enough, he does ask her out!  But not because he thinks she'll be a great asset for the family business.  He asks her out because he's actually attracted to her!

Used to viewing life from a sushi tinted lens, Hanayu is completely thrown for a loop by Hayato's attitude towards her.  Seeing him only as a steppingstone to get to her dream, she’s assumed that he also held the same sushi-centric perspective.  So what will happen to their relationship when she actually starts to see him as a person and a boyfriend?

Comments:
On the surface, Mixed Vegetables looks like it could be a hard-core cooking manga (i.e. sushi versus pastries).  However, while cooking provides the backdrop for our characters and occupies much of their time, it's more of a high school comedy romance.  More specifically, it's about a sushi otaku's introduction to love.  By the end of the first volume, you don't see Hanayu and her fellow students do anything more elaborate than cut cucumbers, measure sugar, and take a written test.  The driving force of the story is definitely less about food and more about Hanayu figuring out what it means to be Hayato's girlfriend.

Hanayu's a hard character to relate to.  A hard-core sushi otaku, her goal is to become a sushi chef, and she somehow works it out in her mind that she needs to marry into a sushi family for her parents to consent to that choice of a career.  She captures Hayato's attention without much effort by the end of Chapter 2, but once she's got him, she doesn't know what to do with him because he's more interested in her than in fish (although it's unclear why EXACTLY he is attracted to her).

At that point, the story transitions to that of a girl entering into a relationship because of ulterior motives with the added awkwardness of first love layered on top.  As the relationship progresses, Hanayu learns to see Hayato as a person, not as a means to reach her goal, and actually starts becoming attracted to him.  However, strangely enough, instead of making things easier for her, that actually makes things worse.

Meanwhile, we have Hayato, the "normal" half of the couple.  He's certainly one of the best students in the cooking class, but he's not obsessed with cooking or sushi the way Hanayu is.  His reason for asking her out is simply to ask her out. While I don't actually like our main character Hanayu very much, watching Hayato charm her into actually liking him as a person and seeing their high school romantic relationship work out from those beginnings is actually interesting.

 This title is rated "teen," but as of Volume 1, there hasn't been any violence, nudity, or mature themes.