I’m not sure I can remember a series with more elephants in the room than Super no Ura de Yani Suu Futari. It’s like a friggin’ zoo enclosure. I confess that in a sense I’m not the target audience for this, as someone who doesn’t find any romance or allure whatsoever in the whole cigarette smoking experience. Every time they try to pass off a shot of Yamada smoking with a pretty background as some sort of high art mono no aware moment I just kind of cringe.

But clearly, it works. The manga gets lots of accolades and sells a ton. Maybe Japan being a country much less post-cigarette smoking than most of the West has something to do with it. I do confess there’s more here – the remarkable thing, if anything, is that the series is as appealing as it is given how many irritating traits it has. Like the continual treatment of Sasaki is if he were a doddering senior citizen, which I haven’t harped on for a while but still annoys the hell out of me.

It’s got balls though, I’ll give Super no Ura that much. To layer yet another misunderstanding on top of the existing ones takes a lot of moxie. It’s beyond dispute that Yamada is interested in this point, but the “revelation” that Admirer No. 28 was married pissing her off that much would be ample proof if such were needed. Turns out if was his little sister from Mie, and the ring was just her way of pressuring him to get hitched. But the really sad part of this sequence is how preposterous Sasaki-san finds the idea of his having a wife.

This leads to an amusing bit where Tayama-san forces Sasaki to talk to her in Mie-ben. The stigma against regional dialects in Japan is a powerful thing – Osaka-ben is romanticized in fiction, sure, but transplants to Tokyo (of which there are limitless numbers) obsessively work to lose any trace of their accent. If you don’t talk like a Tokyoite you’re branded as a bumpkin. I don’t blame Super no Ura for this, it’s only riffing on the phenomenon. Yamada being as relieved as she was about the whole misunderstanding was cute, especially when Ohno-san mused about how “nobody cared but her”.

Finally, smoking on cold mornings. I’ll take their word for it – doing something disgusting doesn’t seem like it would be any better because you were uncomfortable doing it. But I do like cold mornings for their silence too, all the more if there’s snow (which there almost never is in Tokyo or Kyoto). The point of course is it’s another degrees of separation bonding moment for “Tayama” and Sasaki – soulmates even over something like that. At least the romantic development is happening between Sasaki and the actual personality and not the made-up one, so that’s good. I wish they’d just dispense with the whole charade, though – their potential relationship would be plenty complicated enough even without it.