The author of Mogusa-san, one of my favorite manga in recent memory, has a new series out. Kozuma no Kobito no Kenshin Recipe by Ootake Toshitomo tells the story of a down-on-his-luck salaryman named Oomori Shizuru and a 15-cm tall pixie named Mint, who shows up with the intent of becoming Shizuru’s wife and cooking him delicious meals. The series, whose title translates roughly to My Pixie Wife’s Recipes of Devotion, combines two things Ootake has focused on in his relatively short manga career: exquisitely drawn food and oddball romances.

One big change from Ootake’s other manga—Mogusa-san, Mogusa-san Fights Against Appetite, and Teasobi—is that Kenshin Recipe isn’t published under Shueisha’s Young Jump label. Instead, it’s serialized in the web-only Comic Gamma Plus, which is under Takeshobo: a publisher arguably most famous for its mahjong magazines and manga. Essentially, the Takeshobo audience tends to skew older, and this is evident just from Shizuru being 27 years old instead of a high school or college student. However, Kenshin Recipe’s focus on cuteness means it’s not nearly as horny as many of its Comic Gamma Plus peers.

The highlight of the series thus far has to be the cooking scenes. Mint is around six inches tall, yet she has to use Shizuru’s human-sized cookware. Kenshin Recipe shows the way she gets around this: by casting a disinfectant spell on herself and doing everything from headbutting eggs to utilizing fire-resistant clothing to climb inside a frying pan. Ootake knows how to draw food and make it look good, and this provides a perspective on dish preparation that’s both fun and different.

Mint is the linchpin of the series, and while she’s no Minori Mogusa, she has her own unique charms. Putting aside those who are really into fairies and/or wives making home-cooked meals, one thing that stood out to me was Mint’s reasons for wanting to marry Shizuru in the first place. Having long observed him from afar as he left work every day, his sad figure at dusk made her want to protect him. It’s simple and silly, and even has a bit of wish fulfillment thrown in, but I rather enjoy the bit of agency given to the pixie.

There are plenty more opportunities for absurdity, and I’m eager to read more of Kozuma no Kobito no Kenshin Recipe. Based on Ootake’s past works, though, the truly entertaining parts are going to come when he introduces an expanded cast. It’s his strength with ensembles that brings his work from good to great.

I love to eat. Just thinking about all the varieties of cuisine out there in the world, with dishes for the rich and the poor, gives me pure joy. That’s why one of my favorite manga over the past few years has been a food-themed series called Mogusa-san. The simple story of a cute and gluttonous girl who has mastered the art of stealth eating, I’ve already written two posts praising the series up and down. I recently picked up the most recent volumes and was surprising to learn that Mogusa-san as I originally knew it had come to an end. Volume 10 actually marks the conclusion to Mogusa-san, but it turns out that there’s already a sequel (more on that later). In any case, this gives the perfect opportunity to write an overall review of the manga.

Mogusa-san follows Mogusa Minori, a seemingly normal girl with a seemingly normal appetite. However, one day her classmate Koguchi Torao notices something odd: while Mogusa appears to be writing in class, she’s in fact snacking on a pretzel stick. The reason no one notices is that her pantomime is so convincing that most people assume she’s just using a normal pen. It turns out that Mogusa’s appetite is near-insatiable, and that she sustains herself by eating constantly, hiding her food in plain sight. After Koguchi reveals that he’s aware of her secret, the two of them become “food buddies,” visiting snack shops and other food establishments to bask both in the quantity and quality of various foods.

Generally speaking, there are two different types of food manga. There are the series that bask in portraying the simple joy of eating and drinking, such as Sweetness and Lightning. These works portray characters with wide-eyed expressions as food brings them true joy, resulting in “food responses” that are intense but not especially over-the-top. Then there are the manga that make eating and drinking the most powerfully dramatic and sensual experiences possible. These are the Yakitate!! Japan-type series, where tasting and creating foods becomes a religious experience fueled by impossibly superhuman abilities. One thing I love about Mogusa-san is that it possesses elements of both worlds.

When Mogusa has to engage in covertly satisfying her never-ending munchies, the series emphasizes the physical limits that Mogusa pushes in pursuit of eating. Whether it’s eating a stick of dango in 1/60 of a second, hiding candy inside the corners of her jaws in case of emergencies, she always has a trick (or a pastry) up her sleeve. However, when she’s allowed to just eat without feeling any sense of shame, especially when she’s with Koguchi, the look on her face as she bites into a succulent piece of meat or slurp some delicious ramen carries the same joy as a tamer degree of food manga. While Mogusa’s expressions are near-orgasmic at times, they’re not “actually orgasmic” as one would find in Food Wars!

While the concept might seem like it overstays its welcome, and a part of me expected that might be the case, Mogusa-san actually provides both enough narrative development and a sufficiently robust supporting cast that the series never gets tiresome. Koguchi and Mogusa bond over the course of the ten volumes in a beautiful way. Characters like Taira Chigumi (Mogusa’s opposite in that she has developed ways to hide the fact that she has the palate of a 10-year-old) and Tabe-chan (a professional competitive eater who considers Mogusa her life-long rival) add a surprising amount of variety to the theme of eating. Because these characters grow as well, Mogusa-san shows itself to be remarkably heartfelt while still remaining true to its core themes. Although there’s clearly a decent amount of experimentation in order to keep the concept in motion, the entire manga ends in an extremely satisfying way that leaves little room for disappointment.

So where does that leave the sequel? For whatever reason, it was decided that Mogusa-san would take on a new form, and it has now been replaced by a new series called Mogusa-san wa Shokuyoku to Tatakau (“Mogusa-san Fights With Her Appetite”). Taking place after a short timeskip, Mogusa is now a college student in Tokyo, and because she no longer has her family to support her regularly, she’s trying her best to refrain from eating all the time. The result is that Mogusa-san desperately tries to stick to “only” three meals a day that, while enormous in quantity for the average human being, are clearly signs of Mogusa trying to practice willpower and diligence when viewed in the context of the previous series.

One of the two most notable changes in this new setting is that Koguchi is no longer the perspective character, and readers are instead more privy to Mogusa’s own inner thoughts. The other big change is that there appears to be less of the shounen-esque “wacky stealth eating,” giving the sequel a somewhat mellower feel. A part of me definitely misses the old style, but I am quite curious about how college life is going to treat Mogusa.

You’ll know in just one chapter if you’re going to like Mogusa-san. For me, I think it took about four pages. It’s just a food manga that has never let me down, and I’m more than happy to keep reading it with the awareness that Mogusa Minori is a kindred spirit.

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When it comes to characters in fiction, it’s fairly common for me to find characters that resonate with me. Much rarer, however, is to find a character that is more of a kindred spirit, someone who fundamentally connects with who I am. This is the experience I have when reading the manga Mogusa-san, the romantic story of a girl who loves to eat all the time.

One of my passions in life is food. When I travel, I mainly think in terms of things I can possibly eat. That is not to say that I am a “foodie,” as the term usually implies someone who is in constant pursuit of the next superbly executed dish. Rather, whereas a typical foodie would not touch Chef Boyardee after having freshly made authentic Italian pasta, I can eat both. I can switch freely between Époisses and Kraft American Singles and not feel that my culinary experience has been ruined. Nor do I consider myself someone with no sense of taste whatsoever, or someone who can’t appreciate finer qualities in food. Trying new dishes, revisiting old ones, complex flavors, simple tastes, approaching different cultures through their cuisine, I simply love the experiences that come with eating. So, when the titular heroine of Mogusa-san (whose name is based on mogumogu, the onomatopoeia for munching) shows a similar fondness for eating, I feel this sense of deep understanding with the character. Heck, I even made her my Twitter banner.

Food manga is a fairly ubiquitous genre, and is usually based around the intense experience of eating something so delicious that it can only be described in metaphor. Yakitate!! Japan, The Drops of God, Oishinbou, Gokudou Meshi, all of these series are about the pleasures of specific dishes and how they were made with love and care. Mogusa-san is a different experience, as it’s more about the feelings derived from the act of eating itself. It’s not just that Mogusa is always hungry or has a large appetite (common features in manga characters) which makes this manga a joy to read, but that the sheer bliss on her face—the wide-eyed sense of wonder, the small but genuine smile, the soft blush that fills the panels—is delightfully overpowering. It more or less describing how I feel whenever I eat, and on a certain level, I find this to be something missing from most food manga.

Mogusa-san feels no need for hyperbole, at least when it comes to describing taste. Instead, its sense of exaggeration lies is in how Mogusa manages to accomplish the task of eating nearly 24/7. While Mogusa is embarrassed about her love of food (because every girl around her is more about dieting), it certainly doesn’t stop her because Mogusa has mastered the art of stealth eating. She keeps packages of eel jerky in her wallet. She disguises an extra helping of rice as a French dictionary. In the image below, Mogusa is supposedly eating only one “Takenoko” chocolate snack, but is actually eating multiple ones, switching between them constantly with the skill of a wild west gunslinger to create the illusion that she’s only been eating one the whole time. In this way, the techniques used by other food manga to describe the taste of dishes transfers over to Mogusa’s consumption tactics.

I’ve been told that I make food look delicious when I eat, and this is also what I get from looking at Mogusa. As much as I love to eat, I also am fond of watching other people enjoy food as well and i n this respect, I also end up connecting to the boy who befriends Mogusa, Koguchi Torao. It’s rather satisfying to me to see someone’s face light up when they eat something that truly blows their mind. In fact, part of the experience of traveling for me is seeing others’ faces light up as they taste something new and exciting, or something familiar and comforting. The art does a good job of showing not only Mogusa’s sense of happiness while eating, but also the fact that Koguchi appears to fall in love with her every time she decides to chow down on something, which, again, is all the time.

Mogusa-san began on the web-only Shueisha platform Tonari no Young Jump, but has since begun serialization in the real Weekly Young Jump magazine due to its popularity. While the first volume has already been published, you can still read a few chapters online in Japanese, and while the language barrier is an issue I think this manga is one where that matters a little less. It’s a manga that I feel profoundly drawn to, and if you love eating the same way I do (or maybe just really like Sasha from Attack on Titan), there’s a good chance you’ll feel the same way.