Mixed Vegetables 4

Ayumi Komura – Viz – 2009 – 8 volumes

Hmm.   I don’t know what to say.  Normally I can find something noteworthy about even the weakest, most mediocre shoujo series because I just love the genre and everything that goes along with it.  I mean, I thought Magic Touch was okay because it’s a massage manga, something you don’t see often, even though nothing particularly inspiring is going on otherwise, and I actually quite like Monkey High, which has great characters but lame plots.  But Mixed Vegetables… what am I going to do with you?

I can see where it’s going.  Hanayu lives with a pastry chef and wants to be a sushi chef, Hayato lives with a sushi chef and wants to be a pastry chef.  When boy and girl meet, they will inspire each other to realize their dreams.  In this volume, it looks like Hayato’s dream might not be as clear-cut as that, but I find I really don’t care.  There is absolutely no chemistry between Hayato and Hanayu, no interesting obstacles or incidents coming up to either help them down their path or hinder them seriously,  and the best things they have going for them are being optimistic, seize-the-day manga characters.

There was a chapter about the teacher making home visits to discuss things with the students’ parents.  I have no idea why Hanayu was freaking out about this since she’d already been given everyone’s blessing.  Later, there’s a kind of boring subplot about Saki, the other employee at the sushi restaurant.  I just could not be made to care.  Then it moves into a little bit of a story about Hayato’s grandfather, who is no longer alive.  We just have to relive sketchy memories that the characters are using as inspiration.  Maybe there will be flashbacks next volume, but… it looks like a major point of contention for the next volume or so is going to be this character that we don’t get to meet or really even know.

They don’t even cook in this volume.

There’s all sorts of problems when a cooking manga becomes a life story about characters who like to cook, but don’t, and then don’t do anything else interesting either.  Like I said, it’s rare that I can’t find something to like in even the lamest shoujo, but that’s just how things are in Mixed Vegetables.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.