I think you're getting confused here. Miya said "that's a dude" in response to Haruki noticing what Haruki thought was a beautiful woman. This at the time was our only info, as Kiyo had not yet spoken to Haruki.

I did not interpret this as a statement Miya or the author was making to criticize trans people. That would be tonally weird and out of character. Given Kiyo sometimes refers to himself as a man, it would make more sense to me if Miya were confused. Even if Kiyo isn't a male crossdresser, crossdressers are still real and connected with LGBT. It isn't a sign of prejudice to think the person in a dress and makeup referring to themselves as a man is a crossdresser. This explicitly isn't a lesbian bar.

We know "male crossdresser" is wrong only because of a -later- conversation without Miya and with Haruki, which I could not have possibly taken into account before reading that far. At this point, Kiyo does not refer to himself as "genderfluid nonbinary," despite using a lot of lesser known terms. That along with some other terms is you bringing in your own labels. Maybe better than Miya's, but still not how Kiyo describes himself.

Edit: In case this isn't clear enough, I'm not taking a position on the "correct" set of labels.

last edited at Dec 11, 2025 9:49AM

Okay, I'm up to date. I also liked this more than I expected. I wrote the rest of this back when I had only read up to around chapter 35, but my feelings haven't changed. For me there was no "reveal" or change in how I saw Mizuno.

Re: yandere, I thought this discussion was funny. There was recently another recent thread, When the Villainess Meets the Yandere, where I argued the yan was more about the person being mentally unwell. Melon quickly pointed out that "mentally unwell" could apply to most drama series on here, so I amended it to to "to mentally unwell in a 'dangerous' way that relates to how they express affection."

With this series, I feel there is a difference between how Mizuno is meant to come across and how she comes across. She seems extremely stalkerish and dishonest in terms finding Haruki's work place, the hand towel / cat (also stating the cat will know only her love due to having no one else, after saying the cat reminds her of Haruki), following Haruki to the bar to find out about Miya, etc. Some of this is guessing on my part, which follows from Mizuno repeatedly stating she never got over Haruki and the story repeatedly labeling Mizuno as 'dangerous'.

Despite that, Mizuno comes across as more lonely and emotionally repressed than dangerous. Haruki is this self hating assholish person- at least in her thoughts, which we have full access to her for the whole story- so it feels like someone on Mizuno's level is needed to break through Haruki's self defeating tendencies.

Mizuno tries very hard to follow explicitly stated boundaries to avoid driving Haruki away. A real person would be likely to flip when they get what they want and start ignoring boundaries, but Mizuno seems to really want Haruki's approval. I'm expecting some sort of 'reveal' that makes Mizuno seem worse*, but Haruki is already ruining her own life here.

*Okay, I take this back. There might have been an attempt at a reveal, but Mizuno still seems nonthreatening.

last edited at Dec 12, 2025 4:20PM

Now that I'm rereading this with the benefit of hindsight, it brings up a thought: Is Kawazoe into women?

Early on, Haruki mentioned Kawazoe living with her boyfriend. However, the story makes it increasingly clear that Haruki just does not realize that women can be anything other than straight early on and would probably be the type to see a picture of a lesbian wedding and ask where the grooms are. It's possible that Kawazoe left some things vague and Haruki jumped to conclusions, just like she did with Miya.

The only thing we really know about Kawazoe's partner is that they live together and take turns cooking for each other. However, Mizuno does see a potential risk in Kawazoe falling for Haruki (I guess in the event that she breaks up with her partner). Though Mizuno leans a bit more towards being paranoid, (like when worrying about Kiyo, though that's partially on Haruki for being a bit clueless and it's even mentioned that her previous partners have suspected her of cheating before so it seems to be a matter of her not setting boundaries properly) she's generally a good judge for these kind of things and certainly has shown to be more perceptive than Haruki. She's also been hanging out with Kawazoe long enough to be able to get a good read on these things.

Not only that, Mizuno does mention in chapter 56 that there are at least 4 people in DAP who have their eyes on Haruki. She seems to include herself and outright names Terauchi as another. There's a chance the remaining 2 are just unnamed characters who never showed up, but assuming they're not, the remaining named characters at this point in the story are:

• Masuda
• Kawazoe
• Shinjou
• Yokouchi

Yokouchi is out since we know he's more interested in Mizuno. Shinjou went into full workaholic mode right away and hasn't really been there that long at that point. That leaves Masuda and Kawazoe as the most likely candidates for named characters. I think Kawazoe being into women is quite likely and it's funny to think that Haruki has just been "surrounded" the whole time and just completely failed to realize it.

Also, some other things I didn't realize the first time around:

• DAP = SAP
• WoohooEats = Ubereats
• Soldforce = Salesforce
• Moonbucks = Starbucks (I caught this one the first time, but just listing them all out)

OMGHGHGGGG I CAN'T BE THIS SERIES IS BEING TRANSLATEDD YOU ARE DOING GOD'S WORK TYSMM for uploading it on here otherwise I wouldn't have known this
I only read the Chinese translated version of this on a website but holy cow it feels so different and I didnt realize that there were spicy chapters in this novel (the Chinese one didn't translate that part due to it's laws there
Overall I very appropriate the effort u put in to translate this novel and I love that u use different fonts in translation :D I enjoy it so much I reread this like 3 times it's sooo good

I'm surprised they even bothered translating it to Chinese if they needed to censor it. I guess it left out a few key parts involving Mizuno and that's why it feels so different.

last edited at Dec 14, 2025 2:41PM

Now that I'm rereading this with the benefit of hindsight, it brings up a thought: Is Kawazoe into women?

Early on, Haruki mentioned Kawazoe living with her boyfriend. However, the story makes it increasingly clear that Haruki just does not realize that women can be anything other than straight early on and would probably be the type to see a picture of a lesbian wedding and ask where the grooms are. It's possible that Kawazoe left some things vague and Haruki jumped to conclusions, just like she did with Miya.

The only thing we really know about Kawazoe's partner is that they live together and take turns cooking for each other. However, Mizuno does see a potential risk in Kawazoe falling for Haruki (I guess in the event that she breaks up with her partner). Though Mizuno leans a bit more towards being paranoid, (like when worrying about Kiyo, though that's partially on Haruki for being a bit clueless and it's even mentioned that her previous partners have suspected her of cheating before so it seems to be a matter of her not setting boundaries properly) she's generally a good judge for these kind of things and certainly has shown to be more perceptive than Haruki. She's also been hanging out with Kawazoe long enough to be able to get a good read on these things.

Not only that, Mizuno does mention in chapter 56 that there are at least 4 people in DAP who have their eyes on Haruki. She seems to include herself and outright names Terauchi as another. There's a chance the remaining 2 are just unnamed characters who never showed up, but assuming they're not, the remaining named characters at this point in the story are:

• Masuda
• Kawazoe
• Shinjou
• Yokouchi

Yokouchi is out since we know he's more interested in Mizuno. Shinjou went into full workaholic mode right away and hasn't really been there that long at that point. That leaves Masuda and Kawazoe as the most likely candidates for named characters. I think Kawazoe being into women is quite likely and it's funny to think that Haruki has just been "surrounded" the whole time and just completely failed to realize it.

Also, some other things I didn't realize the first time around:

• DAP = SAP
• WoohooEats = Ubereats
• Soldforce = Salesforce
• Moonbucks = Starbucks (I caught this one the first time, but just listing them all out)

OMGHGHGGGG I CAN'T BE THIS SERIES IS BEING TRANSLATEDD YOU ARE DOING GOD'S WORK TYSMM for uploading it on here otherwise I wouldn't have known this
I only read the Chinese translated version of this on a website but holy cow it feels so different and I didnt realize that there were spicy chapters in this novel (the Chinese one didn't translate that part due to it's laws there
Overall I very appropriate the effort u put in to translate this novel and I love that u use different fonts in translation :D I enjoy it so much I reread this like 3 times it's sooo good

I'm surprised they even bothered translating it to Chinese if they needed to censor it. I guess it left out a few key parts involving Mizuno and that's why it feels so different.

looks at the 1.4 billion people who natively know chinese, yea idk why they bothered

last edited at Dec 19, 2025 4:24PM