Otherside Picnic, Vol. 4 ★★★☆☆

It always took me a lot of courage to go to the next step in this train of thought.

I didn’t intend to keep ploughing through these, but I was travelling again and had several hours to kill on trains. The development of the relationship between Toriko and Sorawo is very slow, but there is always some degree of forward momentum to it, in spite of Sorawo’s cluelessness. She is like a protagonist in a zombie movie where the world is the same as it is now except that none of the characters have ever heard of the concept of a zombie, except instead of zombies it’s lesbians—though she is the only person like this as everyone around the protagonists clearly think that they are already a couple. This volume does make it clear that that ignorance was somewhat willful; she is too scared to open herself up, even in her own internal monologue, to the possibility of someone loving her. Still, we asymptotically approach lesbianism.

And I know that tattoos are associated with the Yakuza in Japan but her being scared of Migiwa’s Mayan tattoo sleeve he probably just got while drunk on holiday in Central America is very funny.