Moving and Hopeful

I Want to be a Wall has such an exciting premise I couldn’t stay away.

This series is truly a love story about the power of friendship and acceptance. Yuriko and Gakurouta have always felt like outsiders in their lives. Yuriko is an asexual woman, though it takes her until college and adulthood to truly understand what that means. She does not experience sexual attraction to anyone and prefers to read about romances in boys’ love mangas than experience love of her own. She feels like an outcast consistently as all her friends are moving on and getting married, and her family wants to set her up, but no one knows her truth. On the other side, we have Gakurouta, a well-off working man who is secretly gay and is in love with his best friend, who also works on his family property. He keeps rejecting women his family and marriage counselor set him up with, causing issues. The two meet while at a marriage set up, and become friends after admitting their truths to one another.

This is a bittersweet and heartwrenching manga. It’s hard to read about these wonderful people whom their society cannot accept, but at least they have found one another. They still experience many of the same issues that real married couples face, in that they sometimes find themselves jealous of their other friends and don’t know where their trust limits are, but they work hard to get through things together. They support one another and try to make life easier for the other by making dinner and things like that, but it is still hard to navigate life. For anyone on the LGBT spectrum who feels isolated, this is an excellent series that may give you hope or will at least provide you with a literary found family to escape into.

Title: I Want to Be A Wall Vols. 1 & 2
Author: Honami Shirono
Format: Paperback
Pages: 144 // 144
ISBN: 978197533896 // 9781975361020

Three Descriptors: Bittersweet, Sympathetic, Charming

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