Ayano Ookubo is an elementary school teacher. While at a bar she meets a woman named Akari Hirayama. After getting drunk, she ends up back at Akari's home. They end up kissing and trading numbers. However, there's one thing that Ayano didn't tell Akari: she has a husband.
Even Though We're Adults (Otona Ni Natte Mo) is a manga by Takako Shimura, which began in 2019. Seven Seas Entertainment released the series in English in 2021.
This manga provides examples of:
- Artistic Age: The characters are in their thirties (with Ayano being thirty-five) but look several years younger.
- Closet Key: Akari is one to Ayano. When asked by Akari, she doesn't know whether she likes women, but she is attracted to Akari.
- Commonality Connection: Wataru and his colleague (who he still has some feelings for) bond over their partners cheating on them.
- Expository Hairstyle Change: The passage of time is shown in the characters' hair growth. Ayano starts out with a short bob cut that shifts to a semi long before she gets it cut back to its original length ie: the style it was in when she met Akari. In a flashback to her teenage years, Ayano went from Boyish Short Hair to Girlish Pigtails.
- First-Episode Twist: The fact that Ayano has a husband is revealed to Akari and the audience for the first time at the end of the first chapter, but it's such a key part of the premise that many readers will likely already know about it going into the series.
- Foot-Dragging Divorcee: Wataru is reluctant to go through with a divorce since by her own admission Ayano is the one who cheated; but it's less about loving Ayano and their life together than it is about saving face.
- Hair-Contrast Duo: Light haired Ayano is passive and kind of unreadable; dark haired Akari on the other hand is a lot more plucky and emotionally hands-on. Overlaps with them having a more mature version of the Tomboy and Girly Girl dynamic.
- Has a Type: Akari has a thing for teachers; Case in point, we're shown a flashback to a younger Akari having had a Precocious Crush on her teacher.
- Introduction by Hookup: Used non-sexually. Ayano and Akari meet at a bar restaurant. They end up hanging out together and kissing, but it doesn't lead to sex. They do, however, exchange numbers.
- I Want Grandkids: Wataru's mother when she's introduced.
- Marriage of Convenience: Essentially the case with Ayano and her husband Wataru. Neither was all that into the other when they were introduced, and both entered the arrangement so as to not end up alone. It doesn't work out.
- Mistaken for Related: Akari initially mistakes Ayano's husband for her brother. She didn't know that Ayano was married.
- NEET: Wataru's younger sister Eri never finished high school, and still lives with their parents at thirty years old.
- Not What It Looks Like: Poor Akari says this when she finds out that she and Ayano serendipitously moved to the same street, afraid she must look like a stalker.
- Obnoxious In-Laws: Wataru's mother outright dislikes her daughter-in-law's family and derides them for being too lenient with her, though she never makes it Ayano's problem.
- Old Maid: Ayano married at age thirty. She worried that she was getting old for marriage until she met an unmarried man with similar worries.
- Plot-Inciting Infidelity: In a way. The story begins with Ayano and Akari meeting in a bar and later sharing a kiss. The next time Akari sees Ayano is also when she finds out that Ayano is in fact already married, and to a man.
- Relative Error: Inverted. Ayano initially mistakes Akari's husband for her brother. She didn't know that Ayano was married.
- Sympathetic Adulterer: Zig-zagged with Ayano. On one hand, she isn't in love with her husband and is grappling with the increasing possibility that she is more attracted to women, and all she did was share one kiss with Akari which she then came clean about to Wataru. On the other, the story doesn't shy away from showing that (unwittingly or not) Ayano is still playing with Akari's feelings, on top of unfairly foisting upon her the role of The Mistress in other people's eyes, including Wataru, who feels both humiliated by Ayano's infidelity and confused that it doesn't make him upset in the way that he thinks it should.
- Wham Line: Ayano introduces the man with her as her husband, which comes as a surprise both to the readers and Akari.
