ComingSoon Senior Editor Spencer Legacy spoke with The Way of the Househusband: The Gangster’s Guide to Housekeeping authors Victoria Rosenthal & Laurie Ulster about the guide book based on the popular manga series by Kousuke Oono. The book is set to release on July 25 and is currently available for pre-order.
Spencer Legacy: How did you come to learn about Way of the Househusband as a series? Was that recent, or have you been a longtime fan?
Laurie Ulster: I was new to it when I started doing this book. So the first thing that I did was read every single issue. [Laugh]. So I got a great crash course in who this character is and the kinds of encounters that he has and the expectations that people have of him that he subverts. So it was great. I mean, I just immersed myself in it, basically, because it was new.
Victoria Rosenthal: I actually am a very big fan of the Like a Dragon series and had many friends say, “Oh, you like it, you really should check out this Way of the Househusband manga.” And I was like, “Okay, kind of similar vibe, ex-Yakuza, trying to live in normal life.” And I loved it the moment I picked it up. And then when I was contacted by Viz about this project, I was like, “This is one of my favorite manga of all time!” So I was really excited to jump in on this project.
There are so many tips throughout this, in so many different categories. How did you guys gather all this worldly knowledge? Were a lot of these tips that you both already knew? Did you get this from family or friends?
Laurie Ulster: So everything was initially pulled from the manga, so that was the starting point. And then I was given an outline that I had flexibility with that was like, “These are all tips that we want to talk about.” And then it was a mixture of, I would say research, certainly knowledge that you accumulate over a lifetime, and then just filtering it through the lens of the character.
Since it’s such a wide range of topics, how did you decide which aspects of life you wanted to focus more on? Was that also very informed by the series itself or when it was pitched to you, were these already in place?
Laurie Ulster: Yeah, everything was pretty much in place, but like I said, I was going through it and saying, “Well instead of doing this, can we do this? Can we switch this up? There’s more here.” There were things I was unfamiliar with that I then had to learn about. Like a laundry bar isn’t something that, here in New York, isn’t something that lots of people are using. Except they are, when you do some digging and you find out that there’s like a whole movement! [Laugh]. It was just a total mishmash of where the stuff came from, but it all was inspired by the adventures of the character.
The writing style of the book is a lot of fun, as it leans into Way of the Househusband’s world and vocabulary. What was writing in that voice like?
Victoria Rosenthal: I really enjoyed it. It’s kind of that super serious, but kind of in the lens of Tatsu, thinking, “This is the vocab. He knows the Yakuza terms and all that.” And he’s like, “No, this makes sense. We’re going to go to this person’s turf and we’re going to figure out how they’re cooking this recipe.” And it’s like, “W0ait, you just mean we’re going to go check out someone’s restaurant and we’re going to go there?” But it’s also casual. So it was kind of refreshing to be like, “Okay, we’re this tough guy, but we’re making these wonderfully cute recipes.” [Laugh].
Laurie Ulster: It was combining the dramatic with the comedic, because everything he says is intense. There seems to be a lot of drama to every task, but like Victoria said, with very casual language. So that part was fun. That, to me, is the joy of writing — just throwing yourself into someone else’s voice and then go. My only trick was making sure I didn’t use the same phrases over and over.
As a Canadian I was really happy to see tips for snow shoveling. What inspired the inclusion of that one specifically?
Laurie Ulster: Again, that was right out of the pages, but I have to say that ever since then, I’ve been dying to try the “hairspray on the bottom of the shoes” trick. I live in New York now and we got almost no snow this year. I really want to try it but did not get a chance to do it, unfortunately.
Yeah, that blew me away.
Laurie Ulster: I really want to try it because I always had to back everything up with multiple sources, so apparently this works, but I just have not been able to try as of yet.
Victoria, you’ve done a lot of cookbooks as well. How did you get onto, onto writing these cookbooks based in pop culture?
Victoria Rosenthal: It originally started when I moved from Chicago down to Houston. It was me and my husband down here and we’re like, “Well, we don’t really know anyone. I really should learn how to cook.” And a few friends were asking, “Hey, can you share some of the recipes you’ve done?” So I was like, “Okay, here’s some recipes. This is kind of boring.” And I was like, “Sure, I’m writing recipes.” But then I was like, “Wait a minute, all these games I play have food in them. Why not go ahead and start running with that?”
Then I started my blog [Pixelated Provisions] — my blog’s now 11 years old, so I’ve been at it — I’ve just enjoyed it because tying it into a game that I’m enjoying, made writing about the food a lot more exciting instead of just being like, “Use this ingredient because I said so,” but “Use this ingredient because the game calls it out.” So it was nice to finally do something besides games. So doing Way of the Househusband was a nice little change of pace compared to what I’ve done before. It’s similar mindset, but a slightly different style. I love doing it. My biggest goal is just getting people who aren’t comfortable in the kitchen in there and I figured if it’s a franchise that they love, it might convince them a little more.
How did you go about picking which recipes you wanted to include in the book? Was it mostly informed by the Way of the Househusband manga?
Victoria Rosenthal: All of it was definitely informed by the manga. We wanted to make sure that most of the recipes were just Tatsu’s — not some of the other ones, because a lot of it is in his voice. We do include one from Torajirō, so that was kind of nice. But we also couldn’t include any of the recipes because there are a few at the end of the manga and we figured we don’t want to re-cover those because there’s already a written recipe for it. Then in the end, it was just me picking which ones sounded the tastiest. [Laugh].
Which section, recipe, or specific tip from The Way of the Househusband: The Gangster’s Guide to Housekeeping is each of you personally most proud of?
Victoria Rosenthal: For me, it’s definitely the honey lemon chicken sandwich, because it was the recipe that when I got my husband to watch the anime, that was my way of convincing him to read the series. He was like, “Can we make that one day? That sounds delicious.” And then when I got this project, I was like, “We get to finally make the honey lemon chicken!” [Laugh]. So it’s my favorite one and one that he tends to ask for on a regular basis.
Laurie Ulster: For me, I think it was … I had a lot of fun coming up with Halloween costumes. But I also loved the “Babysitting for Gangsters” section — that was really fun to do. And there was also a phrase that I’ve been using for years that I got to put in into the book that I was so happy about, which was “identifying garbage sooner,” because I feel like that’s a life skill that most people lack. [Laugh]. Those were the big ones that were fun to put in. Like, people, you open up an envelope and you leave it on the table. I’m like, “No, no, that’s garbage. Now that does not need to sit there for an hour before it is garbage.”
That’s such a good point.
Victoria Rosenthal: I’m definitely guilty of that. I have a pile of envelopes right now on my counter from a week ago! [Laugh].
I do too!
Laurie Ulster: The trick is, you’ve just got to head right to the garbage can.
