Heaven? Gokuraku Restaurant

A hilarious josei comedy with excellent characters and a great sense of the human psyche. While it never bothers to dig very deep, it doesn’t have to. For those of you struggling with the synopsis above, here's a hopefully adequate description that might pique (peak?) your interest. At the heart of the manga is diligent, but unliked employee, the tolerant and reserved waiter Iga Kan. Iga is recruited to work for a new french restaurant, that turns out to be impossible to find, is located next to a graveyard of all places, and is terribly managed by the whims of the irresponsible and spoiled owner Kurosu Kanako.Together with this irrational, temperamental, profiteering woman, these two are perfect comedy counterparts. Not to mention the other people in the crew, who all have plenty of reasons why they probably shouldn't be working at a fancy restaurant at all. I'd say the characters are the manga's strongest aspect. Very defined personalities, and never resorting to stereotypes. Most secondary characters, even the ones around for just one chapter of this highly episodic manga, are at the very least sufficiently charicaturized. Alot of jokes revolve around old-fashioned Japanese customs, unfamiliar to me, but in most cases the author gives you a heads up. Sounds a bit like it’s dumbed down when I explain it like this, but I honestly wouldn’t have been able to enjoy it as much otherwise. Come to think of it, this manga is actually very “Japanese”. Although it’s set in a fancy French restaurant, and alot of the etiquette is similar to ours (although equally alien to this country bumpkin), few of these jokes would work in a western context, since they deal so much with typical Japanese values and societal norms: work ethics, politeness, distance between server and customer,… Combine this with the fancy setting, and you get a huge tension field for the author to draw humor from. The art isn't remarkable at first and might turn some people off. The characters are quite stiffly drawn. Everyone looks like they have a stick up their arse. While this could be interpreted as some lacking on the artist’s part, it honestly only adds to the comedy and it wouldn’t be the same without it. To go a bit overboard: “Heaven?” is a testament to what manga is capable of. In no other medium, from no other country, would you find something like this. It’s light hearted, funny and human. Every single chapter is as good as the last and I was sad to reach the end. Highly recommended. For those interested: it seems like there is also a live action tv series from 2019 based on the manga.