Maddies Manga

Once her interest in men with handsome voices is outed to her entire office, however will Akari cope with the embarrassment? Luckily she has a new acquaintance to help comfort her.

Author

This series is written by t e n. Instagram.

Genre & Tropes

Workplace romance, spicy romance.

Info about this series (ongoing)

There are two volumes published physically, and four volumes published digitally.

TL;DR rating

This volume had a lot of steam, but not a whole lot of plot.

You can check out Volume One of this series for yourself below.

What’s this series about?

Rather than music, our protagonist Akari enjoys listening to handsome men’s voices. There is an entire market for this, I learned as I was doing a little bit of research. You can choose a voice actor who really “speaks” to you, and from there you have your choice of scenario. Some are more romantic, with the audio acting like your boyfriend is leaving you a voicemail, and some can get a little bit steamy. From context, our Akari enjoys the steamer stuff—I say this with absolutely no judgement, I commend a girl for liking what she likes.

At work she discovers a new face—the man who will become our male lead, Yanagida. Not only are his looks top tier, he also has a voice to match. Akari is a little flustered when she first hears his voice, as he is exactly her type. The two’s relationship starts off a little slowly, with Yanagida being her quiet but respectful kouhai (younger coworker who joined the company after her), but thing ramp up rather quickly from there.

Not long after the two of them begin a pleasantly respectful relationship, one of Akari’s audio recordings begins blasting from her phone—exposing the entire office to the voice of a handsome man saying questionable things. Akari can’t contain herself as she’s filled with embarrassment, but luckily Yanagida is there to help her through it.

My thoughts on this volume (spoilers!)

This is by far the spiciest Dessert series in my collection. So much so that I had to double check it was a Dessert imprint several times as I was reading. While it didn’t fully cross the line into dangerous reading territory, I certainly wouldn’t read this in public.

This volume is very thin on plot, with the primary focus being Akari and Yanagida’s relationship. Their relationship ramps up at an alarming speed, and all I could do was hold on for the ride. It did give me a bit of whiplash, as prior to the audio leaking, the two of them seemed so sweet together. I pictured this being more of a slowburn, with Akari eventually confessing her hobby to him. This is not what happend—at least, the pacing wasn’t what I thought it would be.

Instead, after the audio leak happens, Yanagida instantly begins trying to fluster Akari with his voice. There’s a whole scene of him reading one of those scenarios to her, which obviously affects her but like… they’re at work! Stop it! The volume then begins this circle of Yanagida flustering Akari with his voice on purpose, things getting touchy feely, and then an outside force causes them to stop abruptly. It left me hungry for plot! While there were two whole pages dedicated to explain why Yanagida likes Akari, honestly I don’t feel like it was enough. We also don’t know why Akari likes Yanagida besides “his voice is good”. Honestly it felt very shallow, with all of their time on the page showing nothing but lust—no affection.