On One’s Own or with Someone Else: Desire and Gourmandism in Contemporary Japanese Mangas

Since around 2000, Japanese comics in which protagonists eat out by themselves garnered popularity. The solitude of the characters enable readers to relive the situation and even to communicate with them in a fictional manner. The success of such works led to dramatization, and they rapidly gained in popularity. This paper analyzes such comics and their adaptations. In particular, it focuses on two enormously successful series, Solitary Gourmet, which created the boom of solo-eating comics and What Did You Eat Yesterday?, which shows everyday life of a gay couple in Tokyo. The male protagonists successfully escape the traditional masculinity by eating and narrating tastes in monologues, which are traditionally used in female-oriented works. It serves as a device for suppressing and oozing desire here. Furthermore, other comics and their adaptations employing female protagonists deal with food in a more progressive manner. There, women are not depicted as objects of desire but subjective figures who liberate their character and desire through the act of eating, and when they eat together, the differences in their attributes get blurred and there even emerges a solidarity. Food has become a way of liberating and connecting people by dissolving the boundaries between them.