Chika has begun to wonder if maybe she's an alien. Everyone around her is falling in love and wanting kisses and sex, but Chika doesn't have those feelings, and that seems the furthest thing from normal. After bad experiences in high school, she opts to go to a university in Tokyo to study under a professor she admires, and that's where things begin to come together for her as she learns that maybe she's on the asexual spectrum – and that that's perfectly normal.

Is Love the Answer? is translated by Rose Padgett and lettered by Jennifer Skarupa.

Chika has begun to wonder if maybe she's an alien. Everyone around her is falling in love and wanting kisses and sex, but Chika doesn't have those feelings, and that seems the furthest thing from normal. After bad experiences in high school, she opts to go to a university in Tokyo to study under a professor she admires, and that's where things begin to come together for her as she learns that maybe she's on the asexual spectrum – and that that's perfectly normal.

Is Love the Answer? is translated by Rose Padgett and lettered by Jennifer Skarupa.

We are lucky to live in a time and place that understands, or is at least beginning to understand, that there really is no such thing as a universal “normal.” That doesn't mean that it's easy to be different; inviting yourself to identify on any branch of the LGBTQIA+ tree can still be both incredibly reassuring and utterly terrifying. But understanding that it is perfectly normal to call one of those branches home is the first step, and that's something thatUta Isaki'sIs Love the Answer? excels at depicting.

The story follows Chika, a young woman who has begun to suspect that she might be an alien. Chika has come to this conclusion based on the fact that all of her friends have become enamored with the ideas of love and sex while she remains untouched by them. It's not that she doubts that they exist, it's more that she simply does not have those urges and feelings, and that makes her other in a way that is not entirely comfortable. The opening chapters of the book do an excellent job of capturing both what it feels like and the pitfalls that you can stumble into while trying to assert yourself that you are, in fact, normal. In Chika's case, this means that she accepts a friend's suggestion that they date only to be overwhelmed by the fact that she truly does not understand his expectations – and her friends' inability to understand that his expectations are objectively wrong regardless of whether Chika is into them or not. In other words, the opening of the story comes with content warning for sexual assault, as is noted on the table of contents in the book itself. Chika's erstwhile boyfriend does things like dictate how long she can wait before texting him back and assumes that when she comes over to his house, it is consent for sex, even though it is clearly no such thing. When he breaks up with her after her refusal to sleep with him, her friends seemed to be on her side, but she overhears them talking about how it's really her fault, because what girl would go to a guy's house if it wasn't implicit that she was willing to sleep with him? Chika doesn't have anyone to talk to about it, and when her friends push her to meet a different guy, they're annoyed with her when she declines to date him. It's an opening to the book that is both uncomfortable and intensely familiar, and it does a good job of setting up the story to come.

Chika's need for a clean start away from the friends who made her feel alien leads her to Tokyo, where she attends a university where a professor she admires teaches. Unsurprisingly, Chika is in the psychology department, a decision that speaks just as much to her need to understand herself as an interest in the field in general. It is here that she makes her first friends who make an honest attempt to understand her, and after an initial meeting with other first-years in her program that very quickly goes downhill, two of her classmates admit that they were uncomfortable with the situation as well, and that they also deviate from what is considered “normal” sexuality. One is a gay man in a committed long-distance relationship, and the other is a woman who is much more invested in fictional characters and fandoms than she is in finding a real guy. Between them, all three become more comfortable and confident, delighted that they have friends who like them for who they are, not in spite of it.

Also important is the fact that Chika is given the terminology that she's been lacking to describe herself. As you may know, having a word that explains things can sometimes be both comforting and freeing, and when Chika is told by her professor that it sounds like she falls somewhere on the asexual spectrum, Chika has that moment. She begins intensely researching the subject of human sexuality and asexuality in particular, striving to understand not just herself, but what the world is like for other people as well. Her experience with being so fully on the outside has made her want to ensure that she does not do that to someone else; although she never expressly states this, we can see it in the way that she strives to understand everyone around her. The story also delves a little bit into gender identity, with Chika realizing that she doesn't so much identify as a woman as assuming she was a woman because she was born with a female body, when she may in fact feel somewhere more in the agender region. What's important is that the book stresses that all of these are broad spectrums: there is no one right way to be queer or heteronormative. While this may make elements of the book feel inconclusive, it's a really important message to stress, because feeling like the alien or the ghost looking in on the rest of the world is nothing that anyone should have to experience.

Is Love the Answer? is a book that looks to start the conversation. It doesn't offer any clear-cut answers, nor does it settle all of its characters into a comfortable happily ever after. But what it does do is teach the questions to ask and stress that it's okay if you don't come up with a definitive answer, now or ever. There is no such thing that's “normal.” There's only who you are, and whoever that is, it's perfectly fine.