Flip Flip Slowly is a one volume gay romance manga that follows the developing relationship between Kouta, a librarian in a rural area, and Jinichi, an adjunct professor who shows up and becomes a regular. Kouta is a cheerful and thoughtful young man, while Jinichi is sad and reserved. Through their meetings at the library, they get to know each other and feelings slowly deepen between them. Kouta has to unpack some of Jinichi’s negative beliefs about himself and give him the space to make decisions about his future and whether he wants to stay in the small town that caused him trauma.
This felt like a work that’s very of its time and place — the specific portrayal of life in a small town by the sea, the layers of obligation and cultural norms that they have to work through, and the sort of claustrophobic sense of the past being very present. This is billed on the cover as “a low-pressure, cozy romance,” but it felt a bit more dramatic and melancholic than that to me, although overall it’s a nice exploration of two men finding a supportive and caring relationship and choosing how to define it on their own terms.
My only other note is that the author loves to draw the bottom lashes on the characters and it ends up making them look sickly sometimes, which was confusing at points because I wasn’t sure if they were ill (they were not). As a stylistic choice I found it distracting, personally. Still, this is worth checking out if you like fairly low-key one volume romances.
There is homophobia from classmates and his father portrayed throughout in Jinichi’s past.
