Smoking Behind The Supermarket With You Is A Cozy Rom-Com Manga

By now, I hope I’ve made it abundantly clear that I’m an anime fan born to slice-of-life romance, but condemned to a lifetime of battle shonen exposure. So when I learned that a friend gifted another friend of mine a romance manga I’d only vaguely heard of over the holidays, I treated it like homework I actually wanted to do. I binged the entire thing in a week. Naturally, when the three of us finally met up this past weekend, my friend sheepishly admitted they hadn’t even cracked the spine yet. Which means the burden now falls to you, dear reader, to hear why Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You has quietly become one of my favorite recent romance reads, thanks to how effortlessly cozy it is.

Smoking Behind The Supermarket With You, by mangaka Jinushi, is an office workspace rom-com tailor-made for anyone weak to kinda mean goth women who’d step on you and the oddly endearing charm of exhausted, gravely-voiced middle-aged men. It’s a bisexual harvest if ever there was one, and a rare adult romance with an unproblematic age gap. 

Like “Green Yuri” (AKA The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All) Smoking Behind The Supermarket With You, found its humble beginnings as a manga series published on Twitter in the wake of the pandemic before getting picked up by Square Enix as a serial. It’s not only the first serialized series from Jinushi, but it’s also one that’s got an anime adaptation in the wings in 2026. So allow me to yap about why the romance manga is heat so you can say “but I was there!” too.

From the jump, I was immediately arrested by how Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You wastes no time resonating with anyone trapped in the corporate grind, clinging to the tiny rituals that make the day-to-day survivable as the series’ thematic anchor. Be that stopping by a convenience store, catching the warm smile of a store clerk who unknowingly gave you just enough serotonin to make that bread, or just grab some smokes and take the edge off from a hard day's work. 

That’s the cadence of Sasaki’s life. Sasaki is a middle-aged, overworked salaryman who every day gets berated by his boss. The series, on the whole, strikes a chord with anyone who deals with the corporate grind and finds solace in frequenting a haunt only to be graced by the beaming smile of a store clerk that gives you a boost in happy brain chemicals to continue waking up and making that bread. Or, at least doing so until you need to grab a smoke to take the edge off. That’s the case with Sasaki, who ends each day at a convenience store not just to grab groceries, but to bask in the bright, grounding presence of a cute clerk named Yamada.

That is, until the rhythm of his day is thrown off one night when he swings by the store late and discovers Yamada has already clocked out. Instead, he’s greeted by a leather-jacketed, pierced woman named Tayama, who casually invites him out back to share a smoke and some company. Because Sasaki is, frankly, severely face-blind in the most endearing way, he never clocks that Tayama—whom he assumes is some coworker he’s somehow overlooked for months—is actually Yamada without the uniform, customer-service smile, or the practiced bubbly disposition she uses on the clock. 

What follows is a wonderfully lopsided pseudo-love triangle in which “Tayama” (and the rest of the store staff, fully aware of the comedy of errors unfolding) gently teases Sasaki for his obvious crush on her other self. Meanwhile, Sasaki, thrilled to finally have a smoking buddy, finds himself falling for the woman behind the polite platitudes. On paper, Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You is the kind of wacky setup you’d only find in a gag manga or an early-aughts rom-com—the sort of Miss Congeniality, Princess Diaries bit where a change of clothes and vernacular somehow renders a person unrecognizable. And the whole Yamada/Tayama dual identity asks for a level of suspension of disbelief from the reader that practically nudges the series into sketch comedy territory. But what makes the manga sing is that, beneath its deeply silly premise, it harbors a romance that could only work between adults. 

A huge part of that comes down to smoking itself. As a habit, smoking is both a self-destructive vice and a symbolic pressure valve to let off some steam. But between smokers, it becomes something more intimate: a quiet ritual of shared air, time, and vulnerability so addictive that you’d jump at the offer regardless of how chilly it is outside. Simply put, it’s a sophisticated, mature mode of connection that simply doesn’t exist in garden-variety romances. For the non-smokers of the world, it’s the equivalent of loading up a YouTube video on someone else’s account or sending them a song that’s been haunting your brain—forever altering the other person’s algorithm. Folding your tiny, private time-waster into someone else’s life in a way that feels strangely tender. “Intimacy in the modern day,” as Twitch streamer Northernlion puts it. 

Swap out playlists for preferred cigarette brand flavors, fireside chats, and easy shared silences that stretch as long as you let them, and you get something even more specific and profound as the bedrock of a romance. It’s here that Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You takes its cozy premise and leans into how something as ordinary as sharing a smoke with a friend can spark a kind of honesty and intimacy that hits harder than an indirect kiss over a shared drink. The small rituals between Sasaki and Tayama—the teasing, the quiet moments, the unspoken warmth—never overstay their welcome. Instead, each chapter offers another faint glow of their ember‑warm yearning, slowly shifting from easygoing companionship into something unmistakably romantic.

The flames of that yearning are certainly aided by Jinushi’s online illustrations of the two fulfilling nurse‑and‑patient cosplay and other cheeky fantasies. But the real magic lies in the series' quieter, less showy moments of wish fulfillment, threaded through the manga. The simple, disarming intimacy of being understood. Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You is the kind of romance where letting the long fuse of this oddball relationship burn at its own pace is part of the delight. After all, you can’t appreciate a cigarette if you inhale it all in one hungry pull. Beneath the disguises and crossed signals, they’re just two people who genuinely like being in each other’s orbit—and who would quietly ache at the thought of losing the small, daily comfort of talking through the weight of their days or shooting the breeze about nothing at all.