The Fall 2024 Light Novel Guide

Dinner for Three

What's It About? 

Shizuku Futakawa is used to being abandoned. So far, he's been abandoned by his mother, his abusive father, and his stepmother. He doesn't have time to wallow, though, because he's responsible for his younger stepbrother Kikutaro. Determined to be a good big brother, Shizuku sets out to ensure a successful future for Kikutaro to the best of his ability.

One day, he returns home and mistakenly thinks that his little brother has been kidnapped by his next-door neighbor, Tsujido. Seeing that the brothers are struggling on their own, tough-looking and aloof Tsujido starts helping out and cooking warm meals for them. For the first time in his life, Shizuku gets a taste of what it's like to be cared for...

Dinner for Three is written by Yuu Hizaki. English translation by Katie Kimura. Published by Tokyopop's LoveLove imprint (September 24, 2024).

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

There's a darkness to Dinner for Three that the book does its best to hide behind a cute romance and found-family storyline. Shizuku and his little stepbrother Kikutaro were abandoned by their abusive parents. Their apartment was torn down, and they're struggling to make ends meet. Shizuku works as a host to make ends meet, having had all of his prior jobs sabotaged by his father, who kept stealing from his son's workplaces. Their new apartment came cheap with all sorts of furniture and appliances because the previous tenant died there. Both brothers seem to think that they're in the clover – no more awful parents and better stuff. Since they've moved, if their parents do come back, it'll be harder for them to find their sons. But to their new neighbor, Tsujido, the Futakawa brothers' lives look incredibly difficult. So when he realizes that Kikutaro has been locked out of the apartment while Shizuku is at work, he takes the boy in, thus starting a relationship that grows throughout the short novel.

The fact that we don't get Tsujido's perspective until the very end when a short story retells events from his perspective, makes this a bit of a disconnect. Shizuku is the first-person narrator of the book, and from his point of view, things are doing just fine. He doesn't love his job, but he's spent so long being beaten down by his dad that he thinks he's not smart enough to do anything else, anyway, and he can at least provide food for his brother. The hours aren't great, but he can be there to get Kikutaro off to school. When Tsujido begins offering to help them out, it just feels like the icing on an already amazing cake, because now both brothers get to eat good meals and spend time with someone they feel safe trusting. There's something admirable about that, and if it can be hard to read about Shizuku relentlessly underestimating himself, it's also clear that Tsujido isn't going to let him continue to get away with that. We may not see it in this book, but the author stated that should there be a follow-up volume, we'll see things get better. Shizuku's comments about the way his father beat him and how he protected Kikutaro are all stated in a matter-of-fact voice, which drives home the point of what his life has been up till now and why he doesn't know how to recognize his feelings for Tsujido or how to best express them once he does figure it out.

All of that said, you need to read this with the right mindset because the Futakawas' life is bleak at the start of the book. Shizuku's work as a host is also hard to read about in that he seems to have very little control over it, meaning that he's thrown right into a line of work that has to bring up uncomfortable memories of his alcoholic dad. There isn't much acknowledgment of either of these things, and I'm not sure if that's because the author wasn't fully aware of how dark things are or if they were just actively trying not to let the story wallow in them. Shizuku and Tsujido's relationship has a warmth that helps to make things better, even during the obligatory third-act angst. The only other major issue is that the illustrations don't quite line up with how the characters are described in the text. It's a decent read, and I think the best way to sum it up is to say that if a sequel appeared, I'd read it.

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Lauren Orsini

Rating:

The title of this light novel about a BL romantic pair plus a kid had me expecting a more culinary story along the lines of Sweetness and Lightning. However, this short but sweet and spicy story is less about dinner than it is about, let's just say “dessert.” Readers will want to beware of its detailed depictions of past child abuse, and then prepare for a well-deserved fairytale present day in which two neighbors brought together by proximity and animal magnetism end up falling in love.

Shizuku is too dumb to function, but it's not his fault. His piece of shit dad didn't allow him to go to high school because somebody in the family needed to go to work and it wasn't going to be him. Shizuku may have zero common sense, but at least he has a pretty face, so he found work at a host club. Long story short, his dad peaced out with his half-brother Kikutaro's mom, and now the two brothers are struggling to make ends meet. When their neighbor Tsujido finds Kikutaro sitting outside after forgetting his key, he does the decent thing and welcomes him inside for dinner. Cue a big misunderstanding when Shizuku assumes Kikutaro has been kidnapped by Tsujido, and Tsujido assumes that Shizuku in his flashy host suit was out partying irresponsibly. A gentle, domestic romance follows after the trio make “dinner for three” a regular tradition—and a graphically described consummation of that romance follows soon after. It's all portrayed alongside illustrations that didn't quite do it for me; they were simple and generic.

At the end of this short story, the author muses in an afterward about different turns the story could take beyond the ending. Maybe Shizuku's dad returns to cause trouble. Maybe one of his fellow hosts develops a crush on him. Or maybe there's a time skip to Kikutaro meeting a special somebody at college! That whole afterward made me examine the tale with new eyes: yes, it did feel overly brief and simplistic. I would have liked to see more of Shizuku's regulars, a trio of fujoshi who fantasize about their host's personal life (and have no idea how close they are to the truth). It's a sweet little love story, but it had the potential to be more.