The Garden of Words had an interesting idea that really sort of fizzled out and then went somewhere uncomfortable. I picked this up after hearing a lot of good things about Shinkai but I have to say I don’t like contemporary fiction so this really wasn’t the manga for me. The tag line “Can a poem save your life?’ was intriguing. This story isn’t.

A young man likes to skip school when it rains (I don’t remember the names, that’s how uninteresting this was to me). He meets a woman drinking morning beers in the park. They talk some and she leaves him with a tanka poem to which he spends many weeks trying to come up with the right response. Over the next several weeks they meet in the park.

They help each other by just being a friend to each other. She encourages him to follow his dream (making women’s shoes) and he helps her heal from the anxiety/nervous breakdown she had after she was accused of something at her last job (but we don’t know what it was)

And now for what really ruined this for me (spoilers ahead) was this beers in the morning woman wasn’t guilty of what she was accused of….until she meets him. Now she starts that she’s only twelve years older than him and we learn she was a high school teacher accused of seducing a student and now she’s considering it with him. This manga wasn’t helped by the fact I read it while there was a nation-wide manhunt for a teacher who did just that. It’s not romantic. It’s an abuse of power by an adult over a teen in their control. To me it’s not even a trope, it’s a crime. So yeah, totally the wrong audience for this one. I need to go pull it off my netflix queue while I’m at it.