Antique Bakery, Vol. 1
written by Fumi Yoshinaga
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1569709467
Tachibana thinks all sweets taste like sugar. For someone who doesn’t have a sweet tooth, he’s picked an ironic career by opening up his own bakery.
Antique Bakery is one of Digital Manga’s most popular series and one of the more well known manga titles out there. It’s won the Kodansha Manga Award and has been made into an anime now available in America through Right Stuf. The story follows the lives of several men who work in a bakery, and each man has his own very distinct personality.
The manga skips around in time a bit, which can be a little disconcerting, but this eventually smooths out. The opening scene has Tachibana as a high school student thoroughly rejecting his schoolmate Ono with a homophobic slur. After that we move on to the boxer Eiji, who is no longer able to box, even though that’s really what he wants to do. Eventually Tachibana, Ono, and Eiji will all end up working at the Antique Bakery.
While the beginning skips around and shows us various things, the manga gets stronger toward the end, when it concentrate on Tachibana and Ono, who are now both working at the bakery. Tachibana still remembers rejecting Ono after Ono said he loved him, and now Tachibana feels guilty for his behavior back then. Ono, ironically, recalls that a boy once rejected him, but doesn’t realize that it’s his boss. Antique Bakery has a light shonen-ai air to it, meaning it teases and alludes more than it shows.
The artwork can look sparse. The characters always look fine, but oftentimes there is no background, only blankness. That’s an art style, so it’s not a bad thing, but I will say I like seeing more detailed backgrounds. Characters sometimes get squarish faces, yet mostly they’re more realistic-looking (in terms of manga being realistic-looking, that is). There are some really detailed descriptions of the food being served at the bakery, which can make it hard to read without getting hungry. Tachibana seems to be the only one immune to the great cakes Ono creates.
The beginning of Antique Bakery does feel a little shaky with so much going on and the time skips, but if readers stick with it, they’ll see why it’s become such a popular series. This is a series driven by the characters, and what happens earlier on does come back later. For instance, there’s talk about kidnapping in here, which might seem really incidental at first, but is actually important to the story.
