Apron de Choushoku

Apron de Choushoku
By Hiiro Reiichi

Overall: Mediocre
Smex Factor: Red Lantern
Art: Generic-
Status: 1 Volume; Complete

Review: A guy gets fired from his job, runs into his underclassman from college, and becomes his housewife.

While the premise isn’t especially interesting, and it runs the risk of emasculating the main character (especially when he just got laid off his job; going from important executive employee to housewife is kind of a suckerpunch for a woman OR a man). He even lies about being unemployed, so clearly he’s ashamed of not having a job.

However, I have to appreciate the manly admiration the main character has for the “expert housewife”. (Somebody should really tell these translators that “homemaker” is a legitimate word. See? Even spellcheck recognizes it.)

Anyway, the main character seems really surprised and confused about Takano (who is the love interest, in case that isn’t obvious) having a framed photo of “just the two of us together,” which I don’t really understand considering all the overt flirtations Takano makes at him. (AT HIM.) The way he treats Takano seems like he’s already his boyfriend, or even downright seductive (that whole scene in the bathroom is weird), but then he’ll say something like the above thing about the photo that makes him sound completely oblivious. The plot to get the two of them together seems almost superfluous because of this.

But the best is when Takano does finally confess his love (seriously, how did the main character not notice, I mean I can only suspend my disbelief so much), because it reads like the author just said “FUCK IT, I’M BORED WITH THIS PLOT, LET’S GET ON WITH IT.”

I don’t like the implication that fucking her (or his, in this case I guess) husband is the housewife’s “duty.” Calling it a duty isn’t even kinky in this context. It’s just some kind of gross sexism. (I tend to get pretty fired up about feminist issues while reading yaoi manga because more often than not, the bottoming guys are written more as women than men. Even a million cries of “But I’m a man!” won’t change that.)

Speaking of being a man, it’s like the main character has never even heard of homosexuality. Dude, this is the twenty-first century and your best bud just stuck his tongue down your throat. Why does this still seem confusing to you? Also speaking of being a man, why does yaoi manga always seem to assume that men cannot hold themselves back? The psychology behind rape is the desire to dominate a victim— The majority of these (admittedly scant) stories are spent trying to convince me that this man cares so much about this other man. Men don’t want to rape those they honestly love, even if they are sexually attracted to them. So why should I believe that the main character being around Takano is a danger to his...virginity? When Takano is supposedly in love with him? The real danger comes from hurting the main character and him never wanting to see Takano again, breaking Takano’s heart into itty-bitty little pieces and then setting them on fire, stomping the fire out, and feeding it to some particularly ravenous and famished piranhas.
And if Takano really is a danger to our main character’s purity, well, then he’s an asshole and doesn’t deserve him anyway.

HAHA, BUT THAT’S ME THINKING REALISTICALLY
GET IT TOGETHER, ARIELLE
I haven’t read manga for a while. I seem to have forgotten that logic and reason have no place here.
And there ends your morality lesson on rape for the day.

I really like the Expert Housewife though. He’s a funny guy, and the seriousness with which he takes his duty is intense. His stare-down with Takano paralleled a scene from a shounen manga, where you know that in a second, the protagonist and his arch-enemy will leap at each others’ throats (each will be doing backflips while doing so too). Except that Takano would pull out a calculator or something else business-like, and Expert Housewife would stab him with knitting needles or something.

Wait, I lied about your rape/morality lesson ending for the day. I am all kinds of not okay with how Expert Housewife basically shames the main character into feeling guilty that he didn’t let Takano rape him.
THE FUCK, EXPERT HOUSEWIFE
I THOUGHT WE WERE COOL
THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS

I’m still mad at him, but apparently Expert Housewife feels kind of bad about it and also his husband is dead, which our main character expresses his condolences about with some pretty amazing tact.
The more I think about it, the sadder his story seems. I mean, the bit about him basically performing his housewife duties so that they can…have a harmonious relationship in death…? Is kind of hard to take seriously, but the fact that he actually managed to build a family only to have it torn away after a short period is honestly kind of heartbreaking.

His son is precious though. “Go ahead Dad, Dad’s dead, it’s not like I mind if you start dating again.” You can read between the lines and tell that he’s just saying his mopey dad really needs to get laid.

(I’m encroaching on some dangerous semblance of reality again here, but how do they get money if Expert Housewife doesn’t work? And he always seems to be at the store. Who takes care of his kid? Does he just leave him alone all the time?)

I’m going to ignore the fact that all of this somehow gets the main character to want to have sex with Takano. I’m also going to ignore the fact that everyone is gay for the main character. And that the author subconsciously believes that all men are scum.

The ending’s nice enough. It wraps up the plot point mentioned in the first chapter and solidifies Takano’s idiocy. It even gives some of the main character’s pride back to him (the the femininity that his face grew into, stayed). Also there’s some naked-apron kink that I’m surprised the story took so long to get to.


And I want to put it out there that I really like the line “If he’d said that before…he’d be tasting my fist instead of my meals.”

Also this is creepy.