The panels shared here are from the first chapter and all plot information shared is from the basic premise of the story. While I opted to keep this review relatively spoiler-free, I don't think accidentally ingesting spoilers would really change someone's experience of reading it. I made the review as short as possible, because I think anything longer than this would have to be twenty pages long.

Pumpkin and Mayonnaise is a work so tightly wound it is strained to the point of breaking. Every action is slow and quiet, but quiet the way a Tennessee Williams play is quiet. The actions are slow because the characters and Nananan both understand how easy it is to ruin anyone’s life. I wouldn’t call any of the characters in Pumpkin and Mayonnaise good. However, outside of a few select men (and this is definitely about them being men), none of them are actively evil or cruel either.

I think a lot of writers set out to make ‘complex’ and ‘morally grey’ characters. This is a slightly different situation. It doesn’t feel like Nananan is interested in the moral standing of her characters at all. That isn’t to say it's careless, but rather, Pumpkin and Mayonnaise is not interested in moralizing or apologizing for any one person’s shortcomings. It doesn’t seem to be the same cold sense of distance you might have from an attempt at objectivity. The best analogy for the emotional texture I can think of is how a parent might speak of an adult child. There is a warmth and tenderness there, but also an exhaustion and a nearly self-conscious freedom in refusing to excuse mistakes.

There is also a sweetness that Nananan refuses to ignore inside of sickly relationships. The story opens with the clear understanding that Miho has a very particular definition of love and she is actively working to expand it. She became stuck in a posture of loss after a particularly messy situation with her Hagio. She is cohabitating with Sei now, and they seem comfortable, if not especially happy. She is supporting him, but this is important for her sense of security. They are broke, but it feels like both of them kind of want to be.

I think I could go further into the nuance of the character-writing and the idiosyncratic panelling, but focusing on those aspects would distract from the intentionally minimal, glass-fragile construction Nananan wrote into this story. The situation is simple. What the people want is simple. The complexity comes out of their consideration for each other and a lack of money.

This obsessive tidiness is very different from the aggressive negative space you would see in something by Clamp. Its casual demeanor is conversational, but this would never be confused as careless. The conversations are always big ones and Miho, specifically Miho, works to shrink them into small talk and polite affirmation. Nananan expects the audience to work to understand how the outline of her history with both Hagio and Sei would position something into a personality that is constantly, crushingly, curling in on itself.