Heart Cocktail

Chalk-Colored People-creator Seizo Watase's 1983 series of short manga in Comic Morning is adapted into dozens of romantic vignettes, each designed to tell a simple love story in "no more time than it would take to smoke a cigarette," which often means that there is little time for even revealing people's names; many tales simply star "Me" and "Her."

Stories include Emblem of My Father, Two in the Beer Garden, Old Hawaii Corner, My Brother's Zippo, and Takeru's Love of Two and a Half Millennia. The tobacco analogy may sound strange in these politically correct times, but it is better than the alternative, remembering that such short manga stories are actually designed to take no longer to read than the average dump.