February 2024: A Sign of Affection

In Need of a Little Romance

February of 2024 ended up being a very busy month for me. I'm no stranger to burning the candle at both ends, but in those few short weeks I was particularly swamped with responsibilities, both professional and personal. Although I had started to feel excited about reading again, and was keen to see what else I could experience after reading my first new book of the year the month before, real life, as it often does, got in the way.

I almost made it to the end of February without reading anything at all. But luckily for me, in the last week of the month, I learned about a new romance anime that was trending, called A Sign of Affection.

I've been an anime fan since I was a teenager, but it had been a long time since I'd watched anything new. It had been longer still since I had picked up a volume of manga - the last series that I read at length was Attack on Titan back in 2014, 10 years earlier. After watching the opening of this anime, however, I knew that this was a series that I wanted to explore further. And in the midst of the chaos that was my February, something short, sweet, and wholesome like a romance manga was a very attractive respite.

Yuki's World

Yuki Itose is a 19-year-old university student who was born with congenital hearing loss. She has very few people in her life who know sign language, so she communicates with those around her primarily through lip-reading and writing messages on her phone.

One day, as Yuki takes the train to her university, a foreign tourist asks her for directions without realising that she's deaf. Yuki is unable to understand the man, and is beginning to panic, until another man on the train comes to her aid. He is 22-year-old Itsuomi Nagi, a student from the same university as Yuki who speaks several languages and often travels overseas.

Yuki and Itsuomi's chance encounter leads to a new friendship, although both of them feel something more for each other. The series follows this budding romance as the two learn more about each other's world and grow to understand their different perspectives and experiences.

A New Kind of Love Language

A Sign of Affection is both a romance story and a slice of life story. Slice of life is a term most commonly used to describe anime and manga, and refers to stories that are about recognisable, "normal" people, and the every day things that they experience. Rather than any grand adventure to embark on, or a supernatural force to overcome, the meat of a slice of life story comes from its characters, and the relationships that they form with each other. The story is intended to be an actual slice of its characters' lives.

As a genre, slice of life isn't too far away from western sitcoms. Friends, for example, is a series about six twenty-something people and their lives in New York City. The conflict in a given episode of Friends can come from a variety of places: maybe there's a new twist in the will-they-won't-they relationship between Ross and Rachel; maybe Monica's parents are giving her a hard time; maybe Joey is auditioning for another terrible off-Broadway play. The scenarios in these episodes are exaggerated for comedic purposes, but at their core, they're relatable to an average viewer and conceivably something that could happen in real life. And centred in all of these situations are the relationships between the friend group. No matter what happens, the friends are always there to provide support and help each other through.

The "real life" we get the most insight into in A Sign of Affection is Yuki's. She makes for a very sweet protagonist, and her point of view as a deaf person is unique and interesting. The majority of the first volume of the manga is dedicated to introducing the reader to Yuki and her life.

It's a genuinely sweet, thoughtful story about communication, empathy, and learning to see the world through a totally different lense.

The mangaka - that is, the writers of this manga - have put a lot of thought into how to properly convey how Yuki perceives the world. They speak in the afterword of the first volume about the research that they did into what it's like to live as a deaf person in Japan, including collaborating with a deaf woman fluent in Signed Japanese who advises them on the signs that Yuki uses in the story. Absolute accuracy isn't always the most important goal to achieve when writing a story, but when depicting a protagonist like Yuki, it's wonderful to know how much care has gone into creating her world and sharing it with readers.

The manga format is an interesting one for a story like this. The illustrations are, of course, perfect for showing the various signs that Yuki uses, and begins teaching Itsuomi as their relationship develops. But spoken dialogue also needs to be conveyed to the reader, and the mangaka have come up with a great method for that. Yuki's internal monologue, or any dialogue that the other characters say when they're not speaking directly to Yuki herself, is printed in regular black font. Anything that Yuki interprets via lip-reading is printed in a lighter grey font. There are also specific font styles used for whenever Yuki types a message on her phone, and even when characters like Itsuomi speak in other languages.

This might sound a bit confusing, but the different methods Yuki has for communicating with others are blended together well, and the reader isn't ever confronted with too many at once. It doesn't take too long for the differences to become natural, and to find yourself drawn a little bit more into Yuki's world and the way she understands it.

What's even better is that the story plays off of these different methods of communication, and uses them to create conflict and moments of interest. Yuki, understandably, doesn't always get the lip-reading correct, and these mistakes are included and discussed within the text.

For the most noteworthy example of this, let's skip ahead a bit to a moment late in volume 3 of the manga, when Yuki and Itsuomi are reunited after he spent some time abroad. Yuki reads Itsuomi's lips and believes that he asks "is it ok if I hug you?", but is left stunned when he instead leans in and kisses her. Her surprise is because in Japanese, the word for hug (ぎゅー, or "gyuu") and the word for kiss (ちゅー, or "chuu") both share the same "uu" sound. So Yuki misreads Itsuomi's question, which was actually "is it ok if I kiss you?"

The misinterpretation isn't a typical mix-up; it thoughtfully incorporates Yuki's experience with lip-reading.

This moment is a brilliant example of all of the manga's concepts coming together perfectly. Misunderstandings like this are such a staple trope of romance and slice of life stories, where the conflict needs to come from the relationships between the characters rather than some external malevolent force. But where sometimes these incidents of miscommunication can feel quite contrived, A Sign of Affection uses Yuki's disability to create a moment that feels much more natural. The misinterpretation isn't a typical mix-up; it thoughtfully incorporates Yuki's experience with lip-reading, and the confusion that can arise when she tries to communicate with people. The resulting encounter feels very authentic, and is one of the sweetest moments in the series so far.

Sweet, but Short

It's a little tricky to critique only the first volume of a manga, because of how short they typically are. The volumes of A Sign of Affection felt particularly short to me - in my own experience when reading manga, generally I've found a volume to collect six chapters, whereas A Sign of Affection only has four chapters per volume. It's true that it's been some time since I last picked up a manga series, and maybe conventions have shifted in that time. Regardless, it's difficult to recommend a volume of this manga in isolation.

I really enjoyed what I've read of this series so far. It's a genuinely sweet, thoughtful story about communication, empathy, and learning to see the world through a totally different lense. The manga format is a really good match for the story, and the efforts that the mangaka have put into portraying Yuki's experience make her very understandable and sympathetic as a main character.

My only genuine critique, in the end, is the reason that I gravitated towards a manga in the first place: I wish that it was longer. The short and sweet respite I wanted ended up being a little too short to satisfy me. However, the series is still being written, with 10 volumes published in English so far. I'll definitely be keeping my eye on it as it progresses, and will be excited to experience it in full once it's complete.