The Fall 2023 Manga Guide

Tamon's B-Side

What's It About? 

High schooler Utage Kinoshita works part-time as a housekeeper so she can afford her fangirl obsession with Tamon Fukuhara, her favorite member of the boy band F/ACE. When work serendipitously sends her to the home of her idol, she discovers that the real Tamon couldn't be more different from his wild and sexy onstage persona!

Tamon is an insecure mess in real life, and what's worse, he's threatening to quit! Utage refuses to let anyone stand in Tamon's way—least of all himself. What's a fangirl to do but roll up her sleeves and support her favorite singer with everything she's got?

Tamon’s B-Side has a story and art by Yuki Shiwasu. The English translation is by Amanda Haley, with lettering by Joanna Estep. Published by Viz Media (October 3, 2023).

Content warning for discussion of self-harm..

Is It Worth Reading?

Christopher Farris

Rating:

Getting to hang out with your fave idol is a fair enough fantasy to base a story around, and hey, why not also make it so he has a terminal nervous-wreck side he's been hiding to facilitate a little gap moe? Smoldering swagger machine and scraggly little fail boy, get you a man who can do both. This is the setup that Tamon’s B-Side and its main character Utage, stumble into as she turns into a housekeeper, caretaker, and amateur life coach for the titular Tamon. It might initially feel odd to shunt all these dependencies for Tamon off onto this upstart teenage girl, but this is apparently Utage's fantasy, so who am I to judge?

While I don't find myself being super-critical of the decent setup, I do take issues with everything else around Tamon’s B-Side, mostly because there isn't much around it at all. The supporting details of this story are astonishingly thin, especially considering how tacitly tied in some of that information would be. We get glimpses of Utage's home life, but by the last chapter of the volume, we're barely stumbling into the realization that she has multiple siblings. Her friends and fellow idol fans are also underdeveloped despite theoretically adding some dimensionality to her fandom life. Meanwhile, Tamon's fellow boy band members are barely acknowledged. While they vaguely allude that this might come down to plot-relevant reasons, at this stage, it feels like an excuse for oversimplification more than anything. Even Tamon's manager, who puts in a few appearances and has a fraught relationship with Tamon's due to corralling his worst impulses, still comes off as an underwritten facilitation for Utage's engagement with the plot.

I'm not against a one-joke setup, and Tamon’s B-Side's joke isn't bad. Shiwasu even builds off it in increasingly funny ways, like Utage realizing she might be just as attracted to her fave's "Gloomy" persona as the more conventionally confident one. And it's entertaining to offhandedly see Utage teach Tamon little self-affirmations. But a seeming refusal to elaborate on its leads' broader relationships and life situations, especially how and why Utage became so fixated on Tamon in the first place, makes the manga appear underdeveloped even at this early stage. A series that's at least nominally about the actual lives and real personas of an idol and his biggest fan needs to integrate more of those details if it wants to be worth following long-term.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

“It may be an act, but it isn't fake,” heroine Utage tells her idol Tamon in the first chapter of Tamon’s B-Side. That's not a sentiment I see a lot in idol stories, whether they're playing it straight, making a point about a predatory industry, or goofing around. But it's at the heart of this deceptively silly volume because when Utage works as a housekeeper at Tamon's home, she finds out that the hot'n'bubbly idol she loves on stage is an incredibly anxious, fairly depressed young man. The Tamon she's been obsessively following for two years is all an act, and in reality, he's a guy who'd rather hide in his hoodie and lament his existence. The story tries to play it mostly for laughs, but there's an authentic story about someone who doesn't find his existence to be valid, something that even merits a mention in the volume's content warning. It's a genuine part of the story, not just a gag.

Not that Tamon’s B-Side is depressing or overly heavy. It has its moments, but it seems at its heart to be more invested in how Tamon's stage persona contrasts with his true self and how Utage starts to see him as a person rather than a product. It also (lightly) deals with the parasocial relationship idol fans are encouraged to have with the objects of their affection and how Utage is slowly morphing out of that into a genuine friendship with Tamon. That's my favorite part of the volume – Tamon's particular form of anxiety is very familiar, and the act he puts on is something that some of us must do to get through the day outside the house. Seeing Utage work on helping him understand that not only is he a worthwhile human being even in his “Gloomyhara” form, but that it's okay to wear a metaphorical mask in public is a positive message. Sure, we'd all like to be our authentic selves all the time, but what the public perceives as “authentic” can be exhausting. We're all allowed more than one facet.

Of course, while Utage is doing this, she is also subject to frequent blood fountains from her overstimulated brain, and she has to own up to her creepy fan habits – even her fangirl friends find her notebook collection of Tamon clippings too much. She's high energy all the time, while Tamon is mostly low, and the contrast works, especially since the story can primarily treat his anxiety and depression both lightly and with the understanding that these are real issues for him. It skews towards the former, which won't sit well with all readers, so be aware. It is balanced out by Tamon's view of his stage persona – he's the “sexy one” of his boy band (F/ACE, which I kept reading in the manga as Fiace due to the font), and he thinks of himself as a sexual predator because of the slimy lines he spouts. That made me chuckle, and it wasn't the only time in the book. The art and translation help to maintain the fine-line balancing act the story is going for, and I'd say that if you liked Phantom of the Idol or My Special One, this is worth checking out.