But that didn’t mean I wasn’t a victim to the age old question: When are you getting a boyfriend? I focused on building my own life, or rather am still trying to figure out how to live it. I’ve also never focused on trying to find a significant other because I just didn’t focus on romance. I’m in my twenty-somethings, only a couple years younger than the protagonists, and never dated anyone before. So much so that this expectation pervades storylines like a doom’s day clock set to explode spontaneously or when you’re a prisoner to a large family dinner and all your relatives want to talk about is how they’re getting older and how they want to see you with a significant other, pushing around a baby carriage carrying your newborn son and/or daughter. In a lot of josei manga I’ve read, it’s a common theme. The manga paints a reality that hits close to home and the fact that it is so utterly relatable and plausible to happen to me is scary yet ironically funny at the same time.įrom my experience, there has been a societal expectation in oriental Asian cultures, namely, that women need to get married and should start a family after a particular age (notably, the dirty thirties). Reading the manga left me with a bit of anxiety as if I was staring down into a deep dark wormhole (a.k.a the future) or standing petrified upon a cliff’s edge, anticipating the moment gravity pulls me into it. I kinda feel that way after reading the first volume of Higashimura Akiko‘s Tokyo Tarareba Girls. Have you ever picked up a manga and thought that the very moment you came across it, it arrived at the most perfect time in your life because it “spoke” to you in a way that you could only understand? Yes, yes I have, you respond.
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