A delight!

Are you in the mood for something sweet, romantic, and just generally heartwarming? This is the perfect manga for you!

A Sign of Affection follows our protagonist, Yuki, who is a young college student with a pretty put-together life. She has a best friend who is insanely lovely, and Yuki manages to handle her adult life well. One day Yuki is on the train and a foreigner asks her for assistance getting around, but as she is deaf, she struggles to help. In steps Itsuomi, a friend of her friend who is an experienced traveler. Yuki points him out at college one day and her friend Rin explains who he is, and through mutual friends and meet cute situations, we learn Rin’s crush owns the bar that Itsuomi works at when he’s home in Japan. This leads us to interactions between all four and Itsuomi kindly asks Yuki about herself and starts to try to learn sign language to communicate with her. Clearly, there are feelings building here and a nice bit of flirtation. Yuki has never been in love before or had any relationships, so her discovering her feelings is very sweet. In turn, Itsuomi clearly had something with a friend of his at one time but is obvious in his attraction to Itsuomi, and he gets points for respecting her and treating her like anyone else, not being awkward around her just because of her deafness.

This is genuinely just so sweet. It’s light, it’s romantic, the art is pretty and there are a lot of hands and fingertips touching to express their budding flirtation. Everyone in the story has been very likable so far, except maybe for Oushi, Yuki’s childhood friend, who is clearly going to play the antagonist role because he can’t believe anyone but him would find her attractive because of her deafness. He’s pretty tone-deaf to her feelings despite being her friend, so I’m sure that will spiral into the rest of the series.

All in all, a super charming little romance that I would absolutely continue.

Title: A Sign of Affection (Vol 1.)
Author:  Suu Morishita
Format: Paperback
Pages:  192
ISBN: 9781646511846

Three Descriptors: Cute, Representative, Heartwarming