Tasuku is starting to feel more and more at home at Cat Clutter, although it means that he’s mostly around adults. Fellow member Mizora Shuji is even younger than Tasuku though, and is struggling with their identity even more. Assigned male at birth, Misora likes wearing feminine clothes and isn’t sure if they just like wearing the clothes or if they want to be a girl, and latches onto Tasuku as someone who seems closer to them than any of the adults. Tasuku is able to talk with Misora about what it felt like to realize he was gay, and about wet dreams, but Tasuku is still new to this as well and is out of his depth when it comes to Misora’s biggest questions.
At the beginning of volume 1 Tasuku felt like a mess and by even the beginning of volume 2 he feels much more stable, and like he’s got the energy to not only think about his problems but also the problems around him (and the way he handles his crush turning out to be, not the direction he expected, is incredibly mature as well). A lot of this volume focuses on Misora, although Tasuku is also able to spend some time with his crush and classmates, and Tasuku bumbles some of their conversations in a rather realistic way.
For Tasuku, admitting he was gay was almost something that came all at once and in some ways it’s a very binary thing in his mind, either he’s gay or not gay (“not gay” encompassing straight, bi etc). But for Misora it’s not such a binary thing, it’s not “either I’m a boy or not a boy (i.e a girl)” and, since I can’t recall the story mentioning non-binary characters (Yuhki Kamatani is X-gender so it’s not a meanly-meant omission), Misora might genuinely not know about non-binary identities and how one of those might be a better term for the feelings they have. As a cis queer reader, I don’t think Misora is a cis boy solely for the fact that they’re agonizing over the thought so much; while I spent literally years working out what my sexuality was I only gave cursory thoughts to “female? Yeah I like that, seems to work just fine, no complaints.” I.e if you feel the need to question part of your identity there’s usually a very good reason you’re doing it!
Tasuku “means well” but ultimately he’s a poor choice for helping Misora, as he’s just too young to LGTBQ+ identities to be a good, cis ally to Misora and when Misora (in a female yukata) is groped at a festival it’s clear that Tasuku hasn’t even ever thought about these situations. He’s a teen: he’s young, inexperienced, and a bit thoughtless; nothing incurable but it’s a rough moment for him to realize this and hopefully strive to do better.
And even “doing better” can go a long way as we see (and queer readers certainly already know) in volume 3 when an old acquaintance of adult Cat Clutter member, Utsumi Natsuyoshi, runs into them and immediately outs Utsumi as a trans man. While this old classmate claims to not be transphobic she’s openly homophobic and clearly doesn’t think that these views are a problem. In fact she even wants to talk about it frequently, with other people, and even have Utsumi go to her daughter’s school to give a talk in case other people are being bullied, ignoring Utsumi’s repeated statements that no, really I’d rather not.
Moments like those make it clear to me that this is a manga written by a queer creator; while Kamatani could be masterfully creating these scenes out of nothing, I suspect that at least some of them are based on uncomfortable, real experiences. The aspect of how no, Utsumi does not want to be rather public with their trans identity, they simply want to live their life while being a trans man, struck a cord with me in particular because of how I talk about my own ace identity. I knew about being gay, about being trans etc when I was in high school but didn’t know about being ace until I was in college. I’m even a bit of a rarity in my group for working out my ace identity at 21 which at least a few years ago was on the young side!
So I decided, I wanted to be a part of the last generation where people didn’t know that ace was an option and so that meant that I would have to do my part and be as loud and public about it as I dared. Yet this doesn’t mean that I expect other aces to do that at all, it’s a very personal choice and I can’t imagine criticizing people for it! So I liked how Our Dreams At Dusk recognizes this, that Utsumi doesn’t want to make “being trans” a huge part of their public life, even if he regularly works with Cat Clutter which is known (even by city officials) to be an LGTBQ+ spot. This volume has some of the most biting and open language on being queer yet and I’m so glad that not only did we get it in English but that Kamatani created it at all. Some parts do feel a little rushed but since the story ends in volume 4, and I have heard that the run was cut short, I would rather have it a bit rushed than perfectly paced but incomplete.