“It’s like I’m learning to use my heart in a new way.”

Adapted from the manga Bokura no Shokutaku by Mita Ori, the Japanese BL Our Dining Table is a healing, comforting series that shines in its candid approach to grief, rejection, and acceptance.

Starring Inukai Atsuhiro (Hazumi Yutaka), Iijima Hiroki (Ueda Minoru), and Maeyama Kuuga (Ueda Tane), Our Dining Table tells the story of a salaryman with food trauma who finds himself overcoming it when he meets two brothers.

It’s a story told from an isolating point of view, from two separate people who’ve experienced grief in their own ways. Two people whose lives were changed when they lost the people they loved. Two people who learn to open themselves back up through a burgeoning romance.

It’s a series that’s easy to relate to.

The greatest comfort in life and the love found in that comfort isn’t just about sharing happiness. It’s being able to trust someone with your pain. It’s a supportive, warm hug or a waiting shoulder.

And that’s precisely what Our Dining Table delivers.

The series balances a found family warmth with a permeating heartache while delivering heart-fluttering understanding. But, most of all, it cultivates a sense of belonging, of being needed and wanted. Loneliness hurts. Yutaka feels the pain of rejection from a family he withdraws from after his parents’ deaths, while Minoru feels lost after losing his mother to a long-standing illness. Both are touched by grief and lost in the isolation it creates for them. Both lose a sense of belonging in their own lives. Our Dining Table shows them discovering that sense of belonging and healing in each other.

Feeling disconnected is a normal part of grief and trauma. It’s easy to forget how warm life can be when lost. Seeing Minoru and Yutaka find themselves in each other even as they contemplate the building romance between them is healing. I love that the series shows there is no ‘correct’ way to grieve. Everyone goes through the process differently, but it also shows the process of opening up again, of allowing oneself to feel what comes naturally. It allows each character to take that time to think. To feel. To love. Even in their struggle to take a step toward romance, it’s apparent their time together changes them. The only direction left to go is forward. Every unknown path is scary, but there’s also this exhilarating feeling of “What if.”

Including a child like Tane in the story opens up another avenue of understanding. It offers a stark comparison between his childhood and Yutaka and Minoru’s. In essence, Tane is the strongest character in this drama relation-wise, especially by allowing Yutaka and Minoru to connect through his unbiased and open view.

But he also allows viewers to see grief through a child’s eyes, through the love he has for the people he still has in his life and the people he gravitates toward.

For a child like Tane, loss is even harder to understand. It’s a scary thing that can steal anyone away.

As a young adult, Minoru’s need to grasp onto anything that reminds him of his mother is strong. For him, he finds his mother’s presence and comfort in her food. And sharing it with Yutaka and Tane not only gives them all comfort but the freedom to hurt. Hurting lets them heal. It also gives Yutaka a safe place to open up.

There’s a lot of joy, safety, and belonging in Our Dining Table and in Yutaka and Minoru’s relationship. And while Yutaka’s patience with Tane certainly tightens the bond between all of them, the real strength in the drama is in not feeling pressured to do or be something other than themselves. The greatest gift a family can give each other, found or otherwise, is the room to ‘be.’ To never look down on or expect too much. The warmth in Our Dining Table is all about just being and healing. Yutaka doesn’t make Minoru feel left behind or less than others. He makes him feel proud and needed. Minoru doesn’t make Yutaka feel ashamed. It all comes together to create a new burgeoning love full of comfort and promise. And family. And damn, if that doesn’t feel good to watch every week. Like the biggest, warmest, accepting hug.

Our Dining Table is beautifully candid, from processing grief to finding oneself through family to facing things so that there are no regrets to realizing that love hurts. You know you’ve found love when you find yourself scared of losing it, even as it’s just getting started. The possibility of loss always shadows happiness, but it’s also colored by the beauty of a moment. As brilliant as the mind is–how it retains, forgets, relearns, changes–the heart is equally incredible. It’s magnificently resilient, from being broken to healed to starting over repeatedly as life continues to teach it.

And that’s a powerful thing to watch on screen.

While the drama does a splendid job of keeping to the essence of the manga, there are some minor changes, especially with Yutaka and his relationship with his family. In a way, the changes worked well on the screen to provide a straightforward look at how grief isolates people, how it makes it easy to withdraw from a situation, and how it colors how we see the people and world around us.

While I would have preferred an even deeper look at Yutaka’s childhood, I was satisfied with how they presented Yutaka’s grief and how lonely it feels to lose your parents and be isolated from the people caring for you.

The downtrodden Yutaka and the responsible Minoru are each weighed down by life differently. Yutaka struggles with feeling deserving, while Minoru wants to do the best he can for his family while being burdened by the need to try too hard. The way Minoru’s younger brother, Tane, brings these two men together is an endearing dynamic.

While sitting around a table eating together, they feel complete in a way they don’t when apart.

The head pats, touching looks, cheerful Tane, and food sharing offer simple moments of gratitude, understanding, and comfort that reach through the screen.

Our Dining Table is a drama you watch when your heart and mind feel heavy.

But, most of all, Our Dining Table also leaves viewers with the heart-rending reality that one day we all have to say goodbye. That the dining table we eat at will lose people with the passing years, leaving memories behind. Pain never heals, but there’s strength in loving memories. There’s strength in having had the love to begin with.

For a drama that heals, check out Our Dining Table on Gagaoolala.

Rating- 4.5 out of 5