I absolutely hate the path this manga has decided to go down.
Very personal story:
A while back I (28M) moved to a new city for an internship and and decided to stay in a student-focused apartment. There I met this girl and we immediately hit it off: wine and snacks on the apartment roof, pool games every other evening, constant walks together, sharing dishes, whatsapp message exchanges every few hours every single day. It was a very rapid and intense bonding.
A week into it, we realized there was a problem: we were bonding too rapidly and... She has a boyfriend. So, she shared her concerns and we had a talk. Like adults. I told her straight up that, yes, I am crushing on her very hard. HOWEVER, I also understand this is not a crush that should be allowed to materialize into anything further, since not only is she taken, but the relationship would also not work, since we would be moving to opposite ends of the globe soon. This reassured her and we decided to decrease how intensely we interact (so meeting every single day and texting every other hour became meeting every other day and barely texting).
We continued on this friendship, without ever pushing it further, but there was always that tiny bit of tension. It was always there because it was clear as day - there was a spark. But it was a spark we both had to keep from turning into any real flame no matter what.
There is a movie from last year called Past Lives. It won some awards at Cannes and tells a story of Korean woman who moved to America, married someone there and then years later her childhood friend from Korea came to visit and they realized that they had a very strong spark too. She had to evaluate her entire life and how a single decision to stay in Korea would have likely resulted in her ending up with the korean guy. It was a movie about that same sort of spark that could be humored for a moment, but had to be kept in check.
I had hopes this manga would go down this path - that the relationship of the main pair would have turned into one of mutual understanding that they were falling in love for each other, but were both consciously 'holding back'. It's a very special type of tension. A tension that I was hoping I could relate to a great deal.
However, the mangaka decided that such a path would be far too adult and so manifests a will-they-wont-they via misunderstandings and people being afraid to share what is on their mind. It's part of japanese culture to be reserved about your emotions, that much I understand, but the lengths to which this manga takes it, while portraying both characters are very mature people just feels wholly unrealistic to me. I think the mutual understanding and just 'holding back' is a far more powerful situation to portray in fiction than 'both too shy to admit their feelings and have an adult conversation about it'. It makes the pair seem like children and it is greatly disappointing to see.