PRIDE MONTH 2025! As love stories go, Mamita’s The Metalhead Next Door is something of a slow burn. This is not a criticism because this pensive, introspective pacing is very much a part of the story’s appeal. The Metalhead Next Door follows the lives of two young men who live next door to each other in an apartment block. Kento is a graduate student whose money problems lead him to renting an apartment in desperate need of renovation. Soshi is the “metalhead” of the title, the largely uncommunicative music lover who saves Kento’s life when he collapses from the cold during a blizzard.
After this fateful encounter Soshi begins providing breakfast for Kento every morning. Despite Soshi’s almost surly projected persona, Kento begins to fall in love with him. However, he is too scared to tell him he is gay. The pair’s relationship remains ostensibly platonic until a trip they take to a metal concert proves a pivotal point for them both. Does Soshi share his friend’s feelings? And how long can they go on with so much unspoken between them.
Creator Mamita provides a quietly intense character study here about how we can so easily become defined by the barriers of the unsaid and lose ourselves in the process. Supplementary characters are limited and when they do appear they serve only to push the plot along (though the small children at Kento’s job at a day care centre providing him with a romantic counselling service do provide some welcome comic relief to break up the otherwise heavy drama.) But this keeps our focus firmly on the almost hapless plight of our dual protagonists as they fumble their way through their feelings across the six chapters of the book.
Mamita’s visuals are suitably subtly paced for the slow build of the story. They employ a largely semi-realistic approach for the main part but with characters occasionally morphing into cartoon versions of themselves to represent moments of frenetic agitation or more extreme emotional release. A neat manga storytelling trick that rarely fails in application. In one regard The Metalhead Next Door is plot lite in scope and yet, in a story that is all about character focus, that is actually an advantage bringing us so fully into the lives and experiences of its two characters.
Mamita • SuBLime, £9.99
Review by Andy Oliver
