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Sensei's Mail-Order Food: The Complete BL Manga Collection
A Boys' Love Story about Finding Common Ground over Delicious Food--the Manga That Inspired the Live-Action Drama!When erotic novelist Enomura Haruka and shojo artist Nakata Miruku are brought together by their publisher to collaborate on a new manga, it seems like a perfect match--until the two meet in person and realize just how different they are! Haruka is a bit of a sadist with a cool-guy personality, and he immediately clashes with Miruku, who's something of a masochist and doesn't match his bright shojo style at all. There's one thing the two have in common, however--their love of gourmet food, especially the mail-order variety. Can their passion for amazing food bridge the gap between them? Or could food be the catalyst that causes their passions to boil over? Includes reviews of real gourmet food items from Japan!
- GenresManga
494 pages, Paperback
Published October 14, 2025
7 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 19, 2025
Taken from the Japanese Wikipedia page for this series:
Despite Seven Seas marketing and even titling this as a BL Manga Collection, it's...actually neither...?
This is an alternating mix of manga and light novel, structured around mail-order food, with two lonely (and extremely straight) middle-aged men (a mangaka and a novelist) standing in for the two authors, who basically wrote this as a friendship collaboration and excuse to write about the food they were sharing together. Initially, it was meant to be entirely autobiographical, but they eventually fictionalized the two main characters.
Seven Seas I guess just looked at the authors' names and the two guys on the cover, said "oh yes they've written BL before, therefore this must be A BL Collection," and then never bothered to adjust that perception while translating and publishing it.
So if you approach it, as I did, from the BL angle, this will be a wildly disappointing experience. Because it's just not. In the slightest. There are a few fujo nods (from their literal fujo manga assistant) at about the 400 page mark, but even she explicitly states multiple times that it's all only in her imagination, and she's fully aware that they're platonic. And while one guy's family gets the wrong idea about their relationship, and there are a few playful fanservice moments, those are quickly dealt with as the jokes they're intended to be.
One of the guys has a personality that's almost entirely based on his obsession with women's boobs - the bigger the better, with an excessive amount of scenes where top-heavy female characters are literally plunking their apparently bra-less (?) gigantic breasts on tables, or swinging them around in cableknit sweaters.
I'm pretty sure both authors are female? But this feels like the most male-gaze story I've read in a while.
Okay, so take out the BL misrepresentation and the Gigantic Boobs - an element that makes me close out of probably 70% of anime, and made me turn to BL to begin with as a genre because I was so incredibly tired of how women were treated in manga/anime...
And beneath all that, this is a decently interesting story about middle-aged creative types who're struggling with loneliness, being single and relatively friendless, and aging out of an industry that churns through its artists and writers at a frightening rate.
Honestly, if you removed the whole big-breasts obsession, there was a lot to like about the characters and the overarching story. I like when there's a bit of a "behind the curtain" look at how difficult and all-consuming it is to be a mangaka, in particular, but also a novelist who has to keep coming up with new works to satisfy their existing readers but also sell plenty of copies to newer, bigger, younger audiences.
There's so much difficulty in staying relevant - and motivated, too. These two guys end up getting through it by forming an Odd Couple sort of friendship - like the movie, not a literal romantic couple - based a bit around their creative partnership but mostly around the mail-order food that's really too much for one person to regularly eat alone.
I'm not huge on food manga, I've realizing - I hadn't actually known it was a whole genre in itself, but I find it overall kind of boring. I'd rather read a good narrative than a gazillion descriptions of what someone is cooking or eating. But this one was handled in a really...well, expert fashion. You can tell both writers have been around for a while and are good at their craft.
Weirdly, though I'm much more familiar with Asumiko Nakamura, it was the light novel chapters I ended up enjoying the most. This was written in a sort of experimental style, with Asumiko Nakamura starting off with a manga chapter, then Yuuri Eda using that as inspiration for a continuation in prose, which would then inspire the next manga chapter, and so on.
Each chapter has one or more mail-order foods featured, with literal photos of the items included, and descriptions, prices, and links to the shops - since they're all real food you could buy in Japan, at least while this was being published. That feels like a really clever way to get companies to pay for their own marketing, although I don't know how it worked in reality. But it's a really interesting setup.
I enjoyed the food descriptions a lot more than I have in other food manga I've tried thus far, and maybe it is because they're real products, so it felt more grounded in a whole sense of "ooh that would be fun to try!"
So if you love trying different types of food and/or if you have a stay-at-home sort of career, or struggles with your age or your creative side, this could be a pretty interesting read. It's just not BL. So Seven Seas needs to hire significantly better editors or marketers, because that's just...lazy.
Both Nakamura and Enokida are renowned for their Boys Love works, but they decided not to incorporate BL elements into this work, as they wanted it to be a gourmet story that could be read by a wide range of people.
Despite Seven Seas marketing and even titling this as a BL Manga Collection, it's...actually neither...?
This is an alternating mix of manga and light novel, structured around mail-order food, with two lonely (and extremely straight) middle-aged men (a mangaka and a novelist) standing in for the two authors, who basically wrote this as a friendship collaboration and excuse to write about the food they were sharing together. Initially, it was meant to be entirely autobiographical, but they eventually fictionalized the two main characters.
Seven Seas I guess just looked at the authors' names and the two guys on the cover, said "oh yes they've written BL before, therefore this must be A BL Collection," and then never bothered to adjust that perception while translating and publishing it.
So if you approach it, as I did, from the BL angle, this will be a wildly disappointing experience. Because it's just not. In the slightest. There are a few fujo nods (from their literal fujo manga assistant) at about the 400 page mark, but even she explicitly states multiple times that it's all only in her imagination, and she's fully aware that they're platonic. And while one guy's family gets the wrong idea about their relationship, and there are a few playful fanservice moments, those are quickly dealt with as the jokes they're intended to be.
One of the guys has a personality that's almost entirely based on his obsession with women's boobs - the bigger the better, with an excessive amount of scenes where top-heavy female characters are literally plunking their apparently bra-less (?) gigantic breasts on tables, or swinging them around in cableknit sweaters.
I'm pretty sure both authors are female? But this feels like the most male-gaze story I've read in a while.
Okay, so take out the BL misrepresentation and the Gigantic Boobs - an element that makes me close out of probably 70% of anime, and made me turn to BL to begin with as a genre because I was so incredibly tired of how women were treated in manga/anime...
And beneath all that, this is a decently interesting story about middle-aged creative types who're struggling with loneliness, being single and relatively friendless, and aging out of an industry that churns through its artists and writers at a frightening rate.
Honestly, if you removed the whole big-breasts obsession, there was a lot to like about the characters and the overarching story. I like when there's a bit of a "behind the curtain" look at how difficult and all-consuming it is to be a mangaka, in particular, but also a novelist who has to keep coming up with new works to satisfy their existing readers but also sell plenty of copies to newer, bigger, younger audiences.
There's so much difficulty in staying relevant - and motivated, too. These two guys end up getting through it by forming an Odd Couple sort of friendship - like the movie, not a literal romantic couple - based a bit around their creative partnership but mostly around the mail-order food that's really too much for one person to regularly eat alone.
I'm not huge on food manga, I've realizing - I hadn't actually known it was a whole genre in itself, but I find it overall kind of boring. I'd rather read a good narrative than a gazillion descriptions of what someone is cooking or eating. But this one was handled in a really...well, expert fashion. You can tell both writers have been around for a while and are good at their craft.
Weirdly, though I'm much more familiar with Asumiko Nakamura, it was the light novel chapters I ended up enjoying the most. This was written in a sort of experimental style, with Asumiko Nakamura starting off with a manga chapter, then Yuuri Eda using that as inspiration for a continuation in prose, which would then inspire the next manga chapter, and so on.
Each chapter has one or more mail-order foods featured, with literal photos of the items included, and descriptions, prices, and links to the shops - since they're all real food you could buy in Japan, at least while this was being published. That feels like a really clever way to get companies to pay for their own marketing, although I don't know how it worked in reality. But it's a really interesting setup.
I enjoyed the food descriptions a lot more than I have in other food manga I've tried thus far, and maybe it is because they're real products, so it felt more grounded in a whole sense of "ooh that would be fun to try!"
So if you love trying different types of food and/or if you have a stay-at-home sort of career, or struggles with your age or your creative side, this could be a pretty interesting read. It's just not BL. So Seven Seas needs to hire significantly better editors or marketers, because that's just...lazy.
November 30, 2025
This book is NOT what the publisher leads you to believe. It is not BL for one, although you can interpret it that way, much like us fujoshi know how to do.
The two MCs are comically tropey middle aged Japanese men who are just like curry - they’re great on their own, but mix them and they’re even better. This relay style story (manga chapter followed by light novel chapter) is really about the romance of food, and if you read it with that in mind then I found it utterly charming and sweet. And made me crave Japanese mail order food. The MCs talk about boobs a lot. And having women call them pigs. But how they come together by their shared love of mail-ordered food is just so soft and slow-burny.
I was utterly charmed. Was it my fav BL? Or any kind of BL? I don’t think so. But I was entertained and finished with a smile on my face.
The two MCs are comically tropey middle aged Japanese men who are just like curry - they’re great on their own, but mix them and they’re even better. This relay style story (manga chapter followed by light novel chapter) is really about the romance of food, and if you read it with that in mind then I found it utterly charming and sweet. And made me crave Japanese mail order food. The MCs talk about boobs a lot. And having women call them pigs. But how they come together by their shared love of mail-ordered food is just so soft and slow-burny.
I was utterly charmed. Was it my fav BL? Or any kind of BL? I don’t think so. But I was entertained and finished with a smile on my face.
September 27, 2025
This is both a light novel and a manga, alternating by chapters, and...well, it's not great. I'm not sure it's really BL as advertised, but if it is, it has entirely too many boobs involved.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews