The further one journeys into the multifaceted drama of Yuri is My Job!, the more one comes to realize how variably appropriate that particular title is. Initially, I assumed it was mostly a playful sendup of the show’s two contrasting levels of social performance – how the personas put on at Cafe Liebe served as filters for more honest feelings, preceding an eventual reconciliation of those two identities into a unified, happier self. But in truth, the story’s progression has been closer to the opposite; spending more time with these characters has only clarified how distinct their real feelings are from the performances at Liebe, whether it’s the contrast of Mitsuki’s precisely performed on-stage actions and raw, clumsily expressed true feelings, or the clear polar opposition of Hime’s bashful, adoring public performance with her confident yet entirely platonic personal feelings.
Thus the title proves itself both more honest than I expected, and also more critical of its assumed intent. Yuri must be a job, because yuri is not an honest expression of human emotions: it is a set of stage directions, useful for those who find socialization paralyzing, but no replacement for the messy, complex negotiation of feelings that define genuinely close relationships. And while we’d all love to find jobs that inspire or complete us, for most of us jobs are simply obligations, the labor we must perform to get along in society. Hime finds joy in her work not because she loves yuri drama, but because she likes her friends, loves to be praised, and is increasingly finding satisfaction in mastering new challenges. Romantic feelings don’t really come into it, which is part of why she was so confused by Mitsuki’s conflation of on-stage affection with genuine romantic sentiment.
Fortunately, Yuri is My Job!’s skepticism regarding genre fiction’s ability to guide our personal relations is matched by an equal dedication to the real work, the messy, embarrassingly earnest discussion of goals and desires and comfort levels that accompany any genuinely close bond, particularly when it comes to mismatches of the heart. Thus our last volume interrogated not just the search for mutual understanding that had so long characterized Mitsuki and Hime’s relationship, but also the thorny incremental negotiations that followed, as Mitsuki sought a mutually comfortable distance from Hime while Hime struggled to express herself as clearly as Mitsuki required. Every happy ending is just a marker in the sand; the struggle to understand ourselves and each other continues eternally, but if we approach it with sincerity and compassion, we will be rewarded beyond measure.
Our ninth volume begins with a deliberate shifting of focus, with our cover at last spotlighting Sumika and Kanoko. In this case, “spotlighting” is more than a turn of phrase – the pair are defined as literally dancing under a stage spotlight, with Sumika once more taking the role of the confident, assertive partner, while Kanoko rests anxious yet trusting in her arms. Their body language is distinct and telling – Sumika appears confident in the dance, while Kanoko neither contributes physically nor meets her partner’s eye. Even the color design emphasizes the distance between them in this alleged moment of unity; the spotlight glows with the yellow of Sumika’s hair, while Kanoko’s gaze seeks the cooler shadows that match her own. Are they perfectly balanced partners, or inescapably misaligned?
The volume proper opens with an ostentatious affirmation of normalcy, with the appearance of a magazine reporter and photographer essentially solidifying the current staff as the faces of Cafe Liebe. Old patterns of banter are reestablished (like Hime still not getting her lines right), and old neglected worries are once again voiced (like her fear of being discovered by her schoolmates). Most importantly, a crucial threshold that once threatened the cafe’s very existence can now be crossed without worry – Hime can finally affirm her feelings for both Kanoko and Mitsuki without it seeming like some kind of affection competition, a stark contrast with their reactions to her previous gifts.
The relative degree of comfort shared by those three is swiftly contrasted against the tension between Sumika and Kanoko, as Kanoko bats Sumika away from Hime with the same possessive annoyance she once aimed at Mitsuki. The arrival of a new kitchen staff aid offers further opportunities to underline this tension, as Sumika draws Kanoko into a reprise of the cover art that concludes with Kanoko retreating from the performance, and stating that such closeness should only be expressed within the context of their on-shift characters. Although Kanoko is grateful to Sumika for helping repair her bond with Hime, that gratitude clearly doesn’t extend to an emergent fondness for Sumika in her own right; Sumika is simply someone she’s thankful helped her, not a friend she’d confide in of her own volition.
As small interactions pile atop one another, the odd distance between these two comes into sharper focus. Sumika is keenly attuned to Kanoko’s feelings, seeing when her “sister” wishes to express something, and preemptively smoothing over any potentially awkward moments. And while Kanoko is conscious of and grateful for the support, she consistently pushes back against Sumika’s suggestion that she might offer anything further, or in particular provoke Kanoko to smile the way she smiles for Hime. Once again, we find a subtle mismatch of desires creating gentle yet persistent friction between our characters – although in this case, it seems Sumika might not actually know what she wants, as she thoughtlessly conflates her general desire to protect the salon with whatever motivates her to keep seeking a greater closeness with Kanoko.
Jumping to Kanako’s perspective, we see clearly that while she is certainly grateful to Sumika for helping her mend things with Hime, that is pretty much the full extent of what Sumika means to her, with no further sentimentality involved beyond “it sure is nice to have someone I can strategize about Hime with.” Given that plus her general discomfort regarding physical intimacy, it’s little surprise she finds Sumika’s playful flirtation hard to handle – she’d likely be put out of sorts even if it was Hime flirting with her, and like Mitsuki, she lacks the more socially confident cafe employees’ easy way with intimacy, and their ability to compartmentalize lighthearted social affection versus genuine statements of the heart. Couple all that with the genuine ambiguity of Sumika’s intentions, and you end up with a natural recipe for miscommunication and discomfort.
Nonetheless, with no other confidants to turn to, it again falls to Sumika to grapple with Kanoko’s ambiguous feelings regarding the new status quo, wherein both herself and Mitsuki are framed as equally “special people” for Hime. Even if the previous situation was acrimonious and unsustainable, it at least involved Mitsuki being as unsure of her status as Kanoko – now, with both Hime and Mitsuki seemingly comfortable with this new normal, Kanoko’s uncertainty means she is clearly the odd one out. Thus Sumika is again the first to grapple with Kanoko’s most ungenerous private thoughts, her lingering desire to somehow oust Mitsuki from the picture entirely.
With Kanoko now seemingly unhappy with precisely the situation she was hoping to engineer, Sumika is swift to ask the key question: what does Kanoko actually want out of this relationship, if she’s neither pursuing Hime romantically nor happy to let Hime find romantic happiness elsewhere? Kanoko’s response is basically a fairy tale: Hime would marry for money alone, never grow romantically close to her own spouse, and maintain a unique closeness with her confidant-slash-maid Kanoko. It is a fantasy of aromantic intimacy that isn’t just unrealistic, but also deeply unfair to Hime herself – but of course, such fantasies of safe, sterilized closeness are precisely Cafe Liebe’s stock in trade, exemplified even by Sumika’s own acceptance of her strange bond with Kanoko.
Thus we find both of our current leads embracing a comforting, crumbling stasis, with Kanoko seeking an unspoken high school crush that can carry her all the way into old age, and Sumika working as partner in crime seemingly because that’s the only way she can hold onto Kanoko, Cafe Liebe, or both. While Mitsuki was able to use the rigidly formatted language of Cafe Liebe as a way to find her own voice, it appears both Kanoko and Sumika have employed it for more regrettable forms of validation – Kanoko through embracing the tenets of conditional, unspoken Class S romance as an actual guidebook for real-world romance, and Sumika through embracing Cafe Liebe itself as a replacement for any external social validation.
One of the great powers of fiction is its ability to offer consolation and community, to let people who seem out of place or unwanted in their own lives feel seen through the poignant, relatable journeys of the characters they love. But just as fiction can open our eyes to new experiences, it can also be a crutch, a way of validating self-defeating behavior patterns by assuming what works for a fictional character might work in your own life. Thus the initially liberating, heteronormativity-challenging tenets of traditional yuri fiction can become their own form of barrier, assuring insecure young readers that a love unspoken and unfulfilled is actually the truest form of love, and perhaps the only one they deserve. Here we see Kanoko and Sumika embodying two of the perils attendant in embracing fiction as your compass: confusing narrative convention for moral instruction, and clinging to the community fiction can foster even when it imperils your own emotional development.
Fortunately, Sumika is not quite so cornered as Kanoko when it comes to people she can approach with her emotional dilemmas. We thus return to the cafe to find her grumbling with Nene, who’s distant enough from all this drama to provide a largely unbiased sounding board. Her response to Sumika’s explanation of the scenario is a blunt, disinterested “why is any of this your problem,” to which Sumika offers an exceedingly revealing response – that Kanoko doesn’t deserve to be left holding the bag, and that “if it was me, I would never let her feel sad like that.”
There’s really only so many ways you can interpret “I wish the girl I call my chosen sister was pining after a nice girl like me, who would never ever disappoint her.” And to her credit, Nene doesn’t skip a beat – she immediately questions whether Sumika herself is in love with Kanoko, in a page dominated by those vast open spaces exemplifying the revelatory blank-faced pop of paradigm-shifting personal revelation. Sumika’s subsequent evasions do little to disprove Nene’s point, but a great deal to contextualize it – as is clear in both her immediate refusal to see herself as “someone like Nene” and her later defining of romantic love as something that is “selfish” and “pursued at the expense of those around me,” Sumika clearly cannot disentangle the basic idea of romantic love from her lingering resentment regarding how Nene’s prior entanglement ended up putting the cafe at large in jeopardy. Her internalized, unquestioned belief that romance equals threat to Liebe means she cannot even consider herself possessing romantic feelings, as that would to her mind be a betrayal of the place she holds most dear.
Confronted by this disconnect between her obvious feelings and her underlying psychological values, Sumika does what most of us would: she deflects and overcompensates, putting on a performance of cheerful affection that even Hime realizes is a little bit much. When new feelings threaten to overwhelm us, we cling to routine – like the reliable patter of Sumika’s flirtation bouncing off Kanoko’s professionalism, a dynamic that isn’t really what she wants, but is at least something she’s come to expect. Her pursuit of a return to normalcy continues into their actual shift, as she confidently provides an explanation for the intimate vacation photos, leaning on the just-slightly-domineering big sister persona she’s come to know so well.
Like most of the best façades, it’s a performance that works so well because it’s laced with truth. Sumika genuinely enjoys pushing Kanoko’s buttons, and her gallant speech on stage is ultimately a fairly close variation on the playfulness she expresses back stage, with even Kanoko’s canned “senpai, there are people watching” responses echoing her “save that for the stage” deflections in the break room. But this time, something happens. Sumika takes her dominant position, Kanoko wilts in response, and Sumika’s heart genuinely flutters – the performance of intimacy has become real, too real for her to even finish the act. So she finds herself painfully able to relate to Kanoko’s own bitterness, as she wallows in the agony of seeking a smile meant for someone else.
With the dam now having burst thanks to Nene’s “assistance,” even Sumika’s dreams are no escape from her burgeoning feelings. As with Hime and Mitsuki, the on-stage dynamics they share at Cafe Liebe seem to entwine with Sumika’s private feelings, presenting a fantasy of a Kanoko who is both demure and demanding, somehow embodying the wilting, “please don’t abandon me” timidness of her assumed persona and the defiant, “you will acknowledge me” confidence Sumika has come to know as Kanoko’s true nature. Consistently performing romantic love on-stage without letting it bleed into your own feelings is a tricky feat even for professionals; for these girls still figuring out their own views on romance, it’s no surprise that submerging themselves in the fantasy of Liebe is making it that much harder to understand their hearts.
To this tangled web of performances and true passions, Mai now adds an additional layer of contrived intimacy: an upcoming scripted performance of separation between senior and junior sisters, a situation that eerily echoes Sumika’s own determination to maintain a safe emotional distance from Kanoko. There’s a cruel irony in how Sumika’s intentions mirror Mai’s unconsidered adherence to Class S dramas’ textual limitations; just as how such stories inherently end on a tearful separation between would-be lovers, inherently implying that lesbian love is a common but fleeting fancy of adolescence, so does Sumika actively hope that what she’s feeling is a passing phase, a fit of confusion that will end and restore the balance of Cafe Liebe. Thus both in text and truth, Cafe Liebe becomes a sort of emotional prison, a paean to yuri longing that through its high walls and doomed conclusions implies no such love can exist beyond its borders.
This mirroring of scripted and spontaneous emotion might be Miman’s sharpest critique yet of the stories on which Cafe Liebe is founded. Can a genre which inherently reifies such heteronormative assumptions truly be considered a triumph of sexual liberation? While conservative social norms have often forced gay romances to remain discreet and implied, at a certain point it seems that loving this particular kind of yuri means also loving it for its limitations – after all, even the play they are set to perform seems designed to revel in the exquisite aesthetic sadness of a love that can never be. Is it healthy to attempt to find ourselves through a genre that implies our true feelings are a passing sin, or is that ultimately just a way of rationalizing and neutralizing the pull of such feelings? Sumika’s feelings seem to embody the bitter end of such a journey: loving the form of Cafe Liebe so much that one favors it over their own underlying feelings, preferring a comfortable, sanitized stasis over the unchained truth of the human heart.
Alongside its thorny thematic implications, the upcoming play also presents a variety of more practical complications. The question of when and where to practice for the play offers Sumika a chance to play the big sister once again, gallantly defending Kanoko from the threat of a Hime-Mitsuki-Kanoko encounter by offering her own home as a practice space. Of course, this only muddles Sumika’s own feelings all the further, as she interprets Kanoko’s eagerness to discuss her Long Term Hime Project as enthusiasm about their own relationship, only to swiftly be struck down. Sumika’s undesired feelings are fast becoming an impediment to her ability to serve as Kanoko’s emotional advisor – but of course, Sumika herself has always secretly viewed Kanoko’s feelings as a fantasy that can be entertained for the sake of cafe unity, but never actually fulfilled. Ironically, the closer she gets to Kanoko, the harder it becomes to maintain the accommodating yet secretly demeaning position of validating fantasies that will never come true, the poise that their entire current bond is based on.
Things were so much simpler before, when romance was simply an impediment to Cafe Liebe’s proper functionality, and Kanoko a dissonant variable to be validated but not truly respected. But now, neither of those things are true – romance has become a poison infecting Sumika’s own bonds with her coworkers, and Kanoko a confidant too precious to keep misleading. Thus Sumika is forced to reassert the old normalcy with whatever force she can muster, first reaffirming her distrust of romance as a whole, and then demanding Kanoko no longer put her in this cruel position of engineering her own irrelevance. If it is impossible to maintain this closeness without hurting either Kanoko or herself, then it’s time to pull back, and salvage what she’s always held dear. But unfortunately for Sumika, we cannot truly live in a time capsule, whether through the gated drama of genre fiction or the maintenance of a comfortable real-world stasis. Life is ever-changing, and fresh irritants will always find a way to meddle with our cozy routines.
So we find an old familiar face returning to Cafe Liebe: Goeido, the former employee who prompted Sumika’s initial fear of romantic entanglement. Her entrance offers a pointed demonstration of her power and philosophy, as she stands outside the panel, her form unbound by the orderly lines of Cafe Liebe surrounding her. Her phrasing is equally charged; she announces herself with a declaration that she’s “come around to play,” implying Cafe Liebe is an amusement park built for her pleasure. While Hime didn’t initially understand Cafe Liebe, she never willfully disrespected it – in contrast, Goeido’s very first statement implies she is here to make a playground of Sumika and Mitsuki’s hard-won sanctuary.
Her idle remarks seem laden with malicious intent as she takes her seat, noting that “the menu hasn’t changed much.” This could simply be a nostalgic reflection on a place she once knew, but given Sumika’s concerns it feels more like a mocking jibe, accusing Cafe Liebe of the very sentimental stasis that Sumika wishes to protect. Her subsequent remarks make her mockery all the clearer, as she blithely states that she “came by to see some friendly faces,” knowing full well the acrimonious circumstances under which she first left the cafe. Through these statements, Goeido swiftly defines herself as something like an “Evil Hime” – someone who relishes their mastery of polite social dynamics, but uses that assumption of civility not to aggrandize herself, but to confuse and tear down others.
Even Kanoko seems taken in by Goeido’s gracious performance, with only Miman’s attentive paneling capturing the predatory curl of Goeido’s lip as she admires Sumika’s candid photos. Kanoko is simply not equipped for this level of social deception; the very fact that she takes such pride in understanding Hime’s true self reflects her general inability to parse such subtle layers of performance, such that she considers knowing one secret about one person the height of emotional intimacy. Thus in her asking for Kanoko’s signature on her shared photo with Sumika, Kanoko can only think “jeez, I guess they were actually friends” – not the obvious, underlying threat of “anything you have, I can take away.” Though the residents of Cafe Liebe find crucial meaning in their performed bonds, Goeido’s presence underlines their fragility, emphasizing how they are both technically performing at the will of customers like herself, and also inherently subordinate to the unmediated romantic connections Goeido so carelessly employs.
Having fallen for Goeido’s performance hook, line, and sinker, and already feeling disturbed regarding Sumika’s recent shifts in behavior, Kanoko ultimately derives the worst possible takeaway from Goeido’s visit: that by clearing the air with Sumika, Goeido might actually restore their relationship to the way it was before. In contrast, knowing Goeido’s methods and the threat she represents, Sumika demands a full ban on her presence. Goeido is riding a line that anyone familiar with online communities likely knows well – through her mastery of “acceptable” social convention, she is able to torment the employees of Liebe without technically breaking any formal rules. It does not take outright rejection of a social code to poison a society; all it requires is one person dancing through loopholes with ill intent, and an overseer unwilling to protect not just the law’s letter, but its spirit.
Thus Goeido is able to gaslight Sumika even in her absence, making her seem like a bitter child unwilling to make amends. Even as Sumika attempts to take matters into her own hands and deal with Goeido outside of the cafe, Kanoko only sees further evidence that Sumika is the odd one out, the crazed outsider who seems to willfully reject social harmony. Shards of both their old habits continue to complicate their bond – Sumika’s terror at romance’s potential for social disorder, and Kanoko’s uncharitable instinct to classify all who oppose her as “enemies” to her feelings in some way. Their navigation of these feelings was complicated enough even when left in their own hands – but with Goeido now stirring the pot, it seems clear they are bound for a painful revelation.
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