While Emi still doesn’t feel totally confident in her VJ-ing skills yet, Kei is ready to go full-steam ahead and run an event with the entire group. There’s a lot to consider in putting on a music event, from venues to equipment, and both Emi and the readers are getting a crash course in just how much effort Kei and her friends put into their hobby to put on a good time for all.
After Hours ends in a crisp three volumes and in some ways it ends the way it starts, focusing more on the here and now of both Emi and Kei’s lives when I really would have loved some more backstory for both of them. We do learn more about Kei through these two volumes, like about her family, but Kei has always been the less enigmatic of the two to start with (which, perhaps unintentionally, reflects how she has her life a bit more settled and sorted than the few-years-younger Emi). I was a little surprised that After Hours continued to stubbornly refuse to dive into Emi’s past and, since she’s the main point-of-view character for the series, I felt like that always kept me feeling a little distant from the story as a whole.
I might be in the minority of readers but I wanted to know more about Emi’s past relationships, especially with her boyfriend; they were serious enough to move in together but when Emi finally talks to him to say she’s not coming back, it’s through a door, with him not saying anything. From that scene I wondered if he had become a shut-in and distant from her, but later Emi mentions being barraged in text messages from mutual friends about dumping him which presents a very different view of him (and, likewise, an indication about how their relationship must have looked like to others).
We also know that Emi quit her job before the series started but while we learn a little about the tech-related work she did, we don’t get why she quit (something that’s still rather unusual for a young person like herself in Japan). Since After Hours goes out of its way to not mention it my first thought was that Emi must have been bullied in some way and left out of desperation, but based on she says, it sounds more like boredom but that in some ways seems to conflict with her level-headed personality! But when Emi articulates her thoughts, things start to click into place: “This happens sometimes, where something you’ve devoted yourself to completely just disappears all of a sudden. I felt like I was a basketball with all the air let out. Like, I just fell down, completely deflated, and lay there.”
Once stated out loud, many parts of Emi’s finally click together but these were thoughts that NEEDED to be articulated; this was something that wasn’t adequately hinted at with her other actions, interactions, or thoughts in the two and a half volumes preceding this scene. So this is a case where I like the character but dislike some of the choices the author made portraying them; perhaps if this series had been four volumes long we could have dived a little deeper, but overall it’s honestly not a major complaint I have with the series. I still loved the friendship between Kei’s circle of friends and their genuine passion for putting on shows came off the page and into my own heart.
I also want to say that I was surprised to look at the author’s bio at the end of the second volume and realize that Yuhta Nishio is actually a man; not only did the sex scenes feel realistically tasteful (and not voyeuristic in the least) but even the casual way the characters dress (after 15 years of reading manga I’m still startled to see female characters in pants) felt like details I’d expect a male author to miss. Nishio seems to have done a fantastic job at taking universal feelings and emotions and putting them into characters who are unlike himself in significant ways. I think that fans of the newly released How Do We Relationship? will also enjoy this story about two adult women falling in love, making music, and figuring out how to make everything work.
