Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to return to the adventures of Hime and her compatriots at Cafe Liebe, as we bound beyond the confines of Yuri is My Job!’s anime adaptation, and onward to the trials of the Miman-penned ongoing manga.
It’s certainly a pleasure to be back – after all, the original premise of this work is inherently fascinating to me, digging directly into the complex relationship between the genres we love, the characters we idolize, and the ways we formulate our own identities. From the parasocial complications of performing selves for an assumed audience, to the inherent commonalities between stage performance, adolescent identity-forming, and the nuances of crafting a public façade that feels both amenable to others and authentic to one’s own feelings, this story has been digging into core questions of both authentic self-expression and finding yourself through art, topics that could not be any closer to my own heart.
Of course, alongside all that rich and thorny themey-wemey stuff, Yuri is My Job! has also consistently delighted as a character story and romance in its own right, on that juicy principle level of wanting to see likable and relatably flawed characters find happiness in each other. Hime and Mitsuki have already proven themselves a charming and winningly lopsided couple, while Kanoko has risen to become the story’s emotional secret weapon, developing a deliciously messy relationship with Sumika along the way. As both a story about relationships and a commentary on how we engage with and reflect stories about relationships, Yuri is My Job! has been a thoughtful and eminently rewarding drama.
This story’s preoccupation with appearances and how we are perceived feels apparent even from the cover art (above), as we see Mitsuki cowering in the foreground while Hime smiles through the glass. Mitsuki is still uncomfortable expressing herself outside of the coherent, rule-based confines of Cafe Liebe’s performances, while Hime is just as comfortable on both sides of the glass, because her two selves are just variations on the same performance. What Mitsuki sees as a rare opportunity to embrace a comfortable performance, Hime just sees as another stage for her regular theater.
That cover and the title spread make it clear that the anime really nailed this manga’s character designs. Beyond that, both versions also share the same visual priorities – character-focused, light on backgrounds, generally emphasizing distinctive reactions. This sequence of Hime reflecting on her obliviousness to tea benefits from the tight paneling and easy interior monologue common to manga; quick panels tend to result in faster “pacing” than in animated format, where every single line must be voiced, and every voiced line requires full visual focus until it is completed. Much like how side-of-panel comedy gags are often unfortunately stretched in animation, here we see this internal monologue proceeding more smoothly and efficiently in its original format.
In contrast, while Mitsuki is uncomfortable expressing herself off-the-cuff, she shines in these explications of tea flavors, embodying the refined, high-class elegance that Hime can only superficially evoke. The contrast is drawn even more sharply through their distinct expressions – Mitsuki piercing the depths of the tea’s composition, Hime with a blank, stunned look. Their contrast speaks to how Mitsuki clings to outdated modes of personal affect for comfort, while Hime is more comfortable with modern affectations. And in the others’ reactions to their discussion, we see more efficient flourishes of manga storytelling, with their identities reduced to charming shorthand for visual efficiency’s sake.
Alongside the strong expression work, Miman’s confident control of paneling is demonstrated throughout, as in this distinct page (above) designed with an eye for controlling the reader’s momentum. The diagonally cut gutter at the top, as well as the tilt of Hime’s head in the panel below, naturally guide the eyes towards the images outside of the panels altogether. This in turn serves as an establishing shot that resets the tone of the scene, as the viewer’s eye is guided by the slanted panels as if reading through an ellipsis, until ultimately rising up to return to the cafe during work hours. An elegant example of how paneling and the arrangement of objects within panels can guide the viewer’s experience, creating natural tempos or intentional breaks in rhythm. And of course, intelligent paneling also facilitates this manga’s preoccupation with larger-than-life performances, as it allows characters in the spotlight to literally step outside of the paneling, adorning themselves with shoujo sparkles and garlands of flowers while they execute their assigned personalities towards the customers.
As we saw in the anime, Hime generally faces adversity by attempting to muddle through with her general “I’m so cute and helpless” routine, refusing to actually learn the details that might add some depth and individuality to her performance. It’s an interesting disconnect, because the “cute and helpless” routine is actually more authentically Hime; she genuinely tends to not give a shit about details like tea flavors, so long as people are being nice and paying attention to her. But while an agreeable, cheerful disposition is certainly part of this performance, she is ultimately putting on a costume that requires rigorous dedication to a whole host of genre-derived specific details – precisely the sort of studied, definable discipline that makes this place attractive to Mitsuki. It is the preeminence of “study the lore to achieve mastery” that makes this place rational, coherent, and inviting to Mitsuki, while Hime specifically hopes to avoid all that stuff through just hammering on the “aren’t I cute” button. We clearly see Mitsuki’s own priorities in her rescue, as she dazzles with the exact details of this tea’s composition.
Hime’s gestures of thanks at being so looked after by Mitsuki carry this conversation into the more personal realm of awkward performance, wherein Mitsuki cannot admit to possessing genuine affection for Hime. Hime tends to see her performances as a massaged yet still legitimate expression of her feelings, while Mitsuki uses her performances to essentially launder her own feelings into a safe, communally accepted language – thus when Hime attempts to continue their gestures of closeness back-stage, she runs straight into Mitsuki’s desperate fear of being known and rejected.
Hime is excellent at using her natural affectation to earn the adoration of others, but otherwise doesn’t actually possess the greatest emotional intelligence. Rather than interrogating Mitsuki’s behavior in terms of how Mitsuki herself might feel, she accepts the arbitrary premise that “Mitsuki is only nice to me at the cafe,” and thus pushes her gestures of affection towards Mitsuki while they’re both on-stage. It’s an unhelpful but understandable instinct; like in her previous relationships, she’s brute-forcing intimacy by relying on the will of the crowd, rather than meeting Mitsuki where she is. Mitsuki is professionally incapable of denying Hime’s affection while they’re on duty, and if that’s all Hime can get, she’ll take it. Of course, this isn’t really fair to Mitsuki; in fact, we can clearly see how Hime’s bold acts of affection on the only stage Mitsuki feels comfortable are tearing her apart.
Speaking of Hime’s casual gestures of affection cutting others to ribbons, we open the next chapter with Hime declaring she’s got a “date” with Kanoko, an announcement that Kanoko is of course extremely normal about. We see a clear point of similarity between Kanoko and Mitsuki here, as Kanoko asks Hime what she meant by “date.” Both of them desire clarity in their social interactions, which is unfortunately a tough ask – human interactions are littered with emotional ambiguities and cultural assumptions, the misunderstanding of which can often carry grave social consequences. Mitsuki allowed Cafe Liebe to become her sanctuary, a place where the rules are established and coherent, while Kanoko actually chose Hime as her sanctuary, relishing in her assumption that Hime would always talk straight with her. But the more Kanoko’s relationship with others extends beyond her hiding with Hime at lunchtime, the more she will be forced to navigate the miscommunications inherent in personal relations.
Justifying her spending habits, Hime blithely announces she’s still determined to marry rich, seemingly implying she intends to maintain her facade through her whole life. It seems a rather lonely declaration, but Kanoko at least doesn’t mind; she remains happy to live in a mirage, so long as that fantasy allows her to remain close to Hime. Kanoko’s great fear regarding Cafe Liebe was that Hime would grow beyond her, would find more friends and decide she no longer needed her gloomy old confidant. We all choose flattering performances or narrative concepts through which to make sense of our lives – we take the discordant bustle of our endless random days and attempt to fix them to some coherent mode, some dramatic arc that makes sense of our failures and suffering. Cafe Liebe offers one particular fantasy of “successful” interpersonal behavior, but we all harbor private fantasies of how our life should be, or how we believe it actually is.
Hime’s enthusiastic explanations for various cosmetic choices demonstrate that she’s actually quite sharp and knowledgeable in her own way; she just doesn’t have any particular attachment to the fantasy promoted by Cafe Liebe. We all have our own passions and specialties, and it’s actually more Mitsuki being the rigid one in this argument, refusing to accept Hime’s particular approach to Cafe Liebe performance. But is that any surprise? Mitsuki demands rules to make sense of the world; Hime denying those rules isn’t just a personal disconnect, it’s an affront to the world she has embraced.
As the false date nears its end, an aborted exchange of gifts highlights the tension underlining their relationship. Though Kanoko has come to accept Hime’s presence at Cafe Liebe, she emphatically rejects the offer of gifts designed to enhance Hime’s façade. If she can’t keep Hime entirely to herself, then she can at least maintain this unique level of intimacy, this understanding of their relationship as an earnest friendship rather than a façade-oriented work relationship. And ultimately, Kanoko’s rejection of this framing appears like it might spark something in Hime as well, a potential understanding that others do not share her acceptance of a façade as a natural form of self-presentation, and wish for an intimacy that extends beyond the mask.
Still, it’s hard to blame Hime when Cafe Liebe itself seems eager to muddle the distinction of public and private selves. After the date, we are swiftly introduced to the concept of “birthday letters,” wherein customers offer letters and gifts to the staff on their actual birthday. Through devices like this, it is made clear the salon actually encourages the blurring of personal identities in some ways, while harshly denying it in other ways (like with romance). The balance clearly cannot hold together, particularly given the profound emotional weight the current staff are placing on their performed lives.
Tensions rise further when Nene comes down with a cold, forcing Mai to take over the kitchen and putting all the more pressure on Mitsuki. Ironically, Mitsuki is in part hamstrung precisely because it is her birthday, meaning she must be ready to entertain the customers as the birthday girl. It’s a quick, sharp beat that emphasizes how much Cafe Liebe truly asks of its employees; everything is a performance, everything you share is meant to make the crowd happy, rather than express something meaningful about yourself.
Unsurprisingly, all this stress and extra labor eventually pushes Mitsuki to a breaking point. She cannot continuously cover for Hime as well as excel in her own work, but her distrust of Hime’s dedication to Cafe Liebe’s performances renders her incapable of letting Hime make her own mistakes. Of course, on Hime’s side, all she feels is the shame of being continuously treated as a useless dependent. As usual, they end up expressing their mutual concern in totally incompatible ways, with each trying to cover for the other, and each feeling like they’re being smothered by the other as a result. Each hungers to be self-reliant, but cannot comprehend the other’s vision of what that actually means.
The following chapter offers us an extended reflection on Mitsuki’s perspective, which is almost heartbreakingly straightforward: she knows she screwed up during their first period of friendship, and is desperate not to repeat the mistakes, but has no idea how to avoid driving Hime away. Everything she does seems wrong, either clumsy or misinterpreted or simply harsher than she intended, and it all is clearly hurting Hime in spite of her intentions. In Cafe Liebe, she found a place where socialization worked according to rules she could understand; now, she finds herself desperate to connect with someone who socializes according to their own rules, and doesn’t seem concerned with keeping up the script of her sanctuary. Can she protect this place and stay close to Hime, or must one come at the expense of the other? And even if she accepted Hime’s nature, would that bring them closer, or would she simply continue to make mistakes and be misunderstood? For ultimately, her desire to have Hime follow the rules isn’t simply because she’s a stickler for rules – she desires that because she knows she can express herself through this system, and wishes to connect with Hime on a field where they can understand each other.
We get another heaping helping of her insecurities as we cut back to before the Blume selection, where it is revealed that Mai’s arm had actually already healed. Though Mai was perfectly happy to return to her duties, Mitsuki begged her to continue feigning an injury, certain that Hime would leave the cafe if she was no longer stuck there. Mitsuki is falling into a classic trap of applying her own feelings to another – because she herself values the rules of Cafe Liebe so much, she believes that Hime’s lack of a similar attachment means she doesn’t actually care about her time here.
Of course, Hime clearly already enjoys working at the cafe and being publicly adored for money, even if she isn’t passionate about the rules – a situation Mitsuki, who dislikes being known outside of this performance, couldn’t possibly understand. Additionally, Hime is actually determined to regain her closeness with Mitsuki specifically – a motivation Mitsuki herself couldn’t believe, because she considers herself a perpetual burden, an anchor weighing Hime down. Mitsuki spends a lot of time weighing possibilities, but her passive, self-hating nature means she can’t actually parse Hime’s motivations
Back in the present, Mitsuki now feels the added pressure of the team working without Nene, which along with Mai’s feigned injury is pushing their team to the breaking point. Is her fantasy of reconnecting with Hime worth sabotaging the shop’s reputation for? And how much does she really care about this shop – was this actually her paradise, or simply a way of escaping the pain of socializing directly for a while? Is there any escape from this anxiety, save through regaining Hime’s affection?
Mitsuki’s resolution to this situation is extremely her – she decides to express her concern and attachment to Hime through teaching her more about the job. This place is Mitsuki’s sanctuary, and teaching Hime about its rules is the closest surrogate she can find to sharing her feelings with Hime directly. Of course, this refracted passion naturally leads to misunderstandings – Hime sees the artifice of this place as a wall standing between her and Mitsuki, a shield that Mitsuki is for some reason perpetually using to push her away, while Mitsuki’s feelings are closer to “caring about this place is a surrogate for caring about me. As such, your indifference towards this place’s etiquette must mean you are indifferent to me as well.” Though Mitsuki sees Cafe Liebe’s rules as a way to facilitate honest communication, Hime can only see them as a way to avoid saying what you mean.
The disconnect in Mitsuki’s feelings, and her frank inability to recognize her own underlying motivations, make for a complex feeling of longing and disappointment as she sees Hime learning from Kanoko rather than herself. Obviously Hime is just trying to make things easier for Mitsuki, as she’s heard time and again how disappointed Mitsuki is in her lack of attention to detail, as well as how much work she’s creating for Mitsuki. But Mitsuki actually wants to be relied on by Hime, wants to be the one teaching her about Cafe Liebe – for as we well know, Cafe Liebe is basically Mitsuki’s surrogate for her own feelings. She can’t rightly complain about Hime taking the initiative and dedicating herself to her work, yet she also feels a sense of abandonment in Hime learning about that work from someone else
Thus we end up with some deliciously painful crossed wires, as Hime seeks praise from Mitsuki for working so hard, and Mitsuki actually acts disappointed, saying she should be the one to teach Hime. Because Mitsuki can’t say what she actually wants, she defers her feelings to the idea of “working hard at Cafe Liebe” – but when Hime actually does that, Mitsuki is disappointed in her for not following through on the subtext of “stay close to me.” Thus Hime feels like she can’t do anything right, because Mitsuki can’t admit that what she asks and what she truly wants are two different things
After work, Hime is able to talk with Mitsuki honestly, and ask if Mitsuki is angry and flustered because of her presence. That in turn gives Mitsuki some clue as to what Hime is feeling – that she might also feel abandoned, or not know what to do. As much as Mitsuki would like to believe that practicing and executing the refined, template-driven performances of Cafe Liebe might bring them together, the underlying truth of these performances is that they are never entirely honest, always more concerned with evoking romantic ambiguity than actually talking through the messy truth of interpersonal relations. Mitsuki wants to avoid the pain of sincerity, but actual relationships demand talking through your feelings, not just smiling and blushing.
Unfortunately, Hime’s follow-up present and announcement that she, Mitsuki, and Kanoko will all match only makes Mitsuki angry. It’s a direct echo of the previous conversation shared by Hime and Kanoko, wherein Kanoko explicitly said that she didn’t want to be considered as “one of the girls from Cafe Liebe.” Both Kanoko and Mitsuki are seeking an assurance from Hime that their relationship is more special than the performance they share – an obvious truth for Kanoko, but more of an unprocessed revelation for Mitsuki, who still clings to those performances as a shield. And as usual, Mitsuki can’t express precisely what she’s feeling, because she flounders and gets angry and acts out whenever she’s presented with emotional pain while lacking a clear script of behavior.
Granted, it’s not the easiest thing to understand Hime’s feelings. Given her pride in her façade, it’s natural to assume even her presumed acts of kindness are in service of some self-image goal. Thus both of them get burned for trying to be honest, as Hime attempts to reach beyond her facade, and Mitsuki attempts to reject Cafe Liebe’s performance in favor of her own feelings. They care for each other, but they don’t trust each other, and their inability to see the desires behind their respective performances means they are doomed to misunderstandings. And so the two collide and separate, Hime certain Mitsuki only cares about the salon, and Mitsuki unable to divide Hime’s facade from her underlying intentions.
Once again it falls to Sumika to clear the air, and tell Hime that for Mitsuki, the salon performances are entirely real. That’s not her version of a façade – that’s the only way she’s comfortable expressing her feelings, and possibly a more “earnest” performance than her stammering, uncertain words backstage. Mitsuki is doing her best to present a version of herself that others will not dislike; but for her, it’s not a flex of talent like Hime, but a genuine survival strategy.
A flashback to Mitsuki at her own school reveals the necessity of this survival strategy, as she once again fails a social test in spite of possessing the best of intentions. Mitsuki values rules and regulations because they provide clarity, and thus feels rules should be shifted if needed to properly encompass her classmates’ harmless variations on dress code. Of course, these sorts of violations generally fall under “just don’t bring it up” territory – but Mitsuki, being unable to read the room, doesn’t understand such vague social allowances. She is consistently punished for failing to obey invisible guidelines, for not being able to parse the things everyone says but don’t necessarily mean.
It was Mitsuki’s hunger for connection in spite of this disconnect that initially led her to Cafe Liebe, as she awkwardly tailed two potential would-be friends. And though her first reaction to Cafe Liebe was an understandable terror and confusion, she swiftly came to see the salon as a sanctuary. There was no second layer to conversations, no ambiguity, because the performance they were sharing was always clear. If the employees were acting on the basis of hidden baggage and indecipherable personal motives, the audience couldn’t follow the performance – thus everything was stated clearly, and the employees even frequently brought up their own standing and motivation in dialogue. To those who lack ease with the ambiguities of socialization, the clear templates of genre can be a tremendous comfort.
As her subsequent, aborted meetup with those two same classmates demonstrates, Mitsuki’s confusion in part comes from her assumption that there is always a “right” and “wrong” answer when it comes to interpreting the behavior of others. She wasn’t seeing ambiguity where there was none; their offer actually was ambiguous, with one girl meaning it sincerely, and the other only being polite. Mitsuki wasn’t “wrong” to agree to joining them, she was just weighing her own desires as subordinate to the desires of every single person around her. If she annoys or causes friction with anyone, she believes she did something “wrong” – but in truth, we cannot help but cause friction with some people, regardless of what paths we choose.
Thus in search of connection with her classmates, she takes lessons from Mai and Sumika, learning from them that the process of becoming kinder, more open, and more agreeable to others is actually a practice you have to commit yourself to, day after day. We often consider social performances a negative or “untruthful” behavior, but the actual truth is that we are all performing to some extent, and that it is only through the steady commitment to performing a better version of yourself that you can hope to one day truly inhabit that skin, and feel those feelings as your own. After this training process genuinely repairs her social bonds, her journey towards employment at Cafe Liebe is essentially set. Her path might be a strange one, but her goal is a universal hope: that by performing the self that she wishes to become, the pumpkin might remain a carriage, and the dream will become real.
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