40 x 40 Chikuwa Kaigi by Unou Sanou

40 x 40 Chikuwa Kaigi is light, funny romance between two forty-year old men. It’s refreshing to see two, fully-grown men discover love and sexuality together. As the back cover copy says, “Eiji and Koichi are such good friends their colleagues think they’re dating. ” As such, I feel this is one of best uses of the manga childhood friends trope I have yet to see.

SPOILERS

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If you read the version that I’ve linked to in the opening paragraph above, the translator’s notes will explain what the titular “chikuwa” is. In essence, it’s a vaguely phallic-looking fish roll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chikuwa. In this manga, it’s sometimes substituted for our hero’s salient bits and, humorously, it’s also used by them to discuss physical disfunction….

Eiji, as he explains in this scene, has been fairly uninterested in sex with this wife lately.

Yes, you read that correctly. When this manga starts, both men are married to women. In fact, the opening scene is the wives discussing just how close their husband have always been and how happy they are whenever they’re together. The wives, meanwhile, are both planning to file for divorce. Koichi’s wife is pregnant by another man and Eiji’s wife has decided its time for her to start a new life overseas.

So the men find themselves newly single at 40.

What I like about this manga is that the whole set-up feels entirely plausible. During puberty, they messed around a lot, in the way of teenagers:

You might think that’d be a clue that they were gay, but honestly, as someone who has been through this, you’d be surprised how deep the river of DENIAL can be. Plus, we find out in a series of flashbacks that Koichi has always known he was in love with Eiji, but thought he didn’t have a chance. In part due to social pressures to lose their “virginity.” And, you know, Eiji just straight up saying that he isn’t gay.

And, of course, we later see this scene Eiji’s point of view and he’s got his reasons for all of this nonsense. I would go into the details, but, honestly, I don’t to spoil this one too much because it’s complete in one volume (about 7.5 chapters). It’s a fast, fun, and funny read.

While I enjoyed the flashbacks to their college days, my favorite bits were the two of them being old together? I liked the office gossip around this power couple, their relationship with Koichi’s children, and their old man domesticity. There’s a number of very funny shorts in the final chapters where the two of them struggle with being old, drunk, and too tired for sex.

The art is fascinating. There are cartoonish moments, like the above, of course, but a lot of scenes have very little–or very light–background art. Even more occasionally, there will be sketched backgrounds, sort of like you see on the image I used as the cover. I found that I really liked that look. I normally don’t put much thought into how the mangaka uses style to imply mood, but, in this case, it was clear that the only thing that was in sharp focus for these two men were each other. Everything else was just barely there background.

Clever.

Anyway, I highly recommend this one. It’s only available scanlated by pirates, as it’s not yet been licensed in English. Given that it came out in 2014, that ship has probably sailed for this manga, alas. If you want to support this mangaka legally, that seems to be nearly impossible. A story of theirs appears in the anthology Kimi no Karada ni Yasashii Kiss / Gentle Kisses on Your Body which was licensed in English by Amimaru–a company appears to mostly just do translations? There is no way to purchase the “official” English version. The one place I found it for sale, it was sold out.

So, what do you do?

Enjoy IRRESPONSIBLY, I suppose….