What Did You Read Yesterday?

"Smoke," by kan and ico

I struggled at kan and ico's table for so long because I wanted to buy ico's beautiful Neon Genesis Evangelion artbook but was reminded by my friend that I should stick with what i came for (doujin and original art). Having seen an example of their upcoming Persona artbook, I can only say, you MUST buy their goods if you love paper. I tweeted a while back that American readers simply do not have the appreciation for paper that we should, and when I saw kan and ico's work I was reduced to repeatedly saying "this is so fucking cool" because I was clearly standing in the presence of people who do appreciate paper. The Persona artbook has special translucent pages with foil accents!! The cover of the Eva artbook is lightly textured around the character outlines!! You just have to touch their books to get it. There is so much care and attention to detail.

"Smoke" is an OC oneshot and is relatively short, with very little background given about the characters (except in the profiles at the end). But it has the air of a fanfic from a practiced writer, with a conceit about deaths from cigarette smoking (one of the characters is a forensic pathologist) and withdrawal symptoms that is classic bl fare. It's moody and atmospheric, clearly calling out for a longer work, and of course the bonus photocards are unexpectedly delightful paper products, featuring a luxurious matte finish that you'll want to run your hand over.

As of this writing, "Smoke" is not available online or for purchase.

Two doujin from halveablock.

"Beacon" (Gundam Witch from Mercury, SuleMio)

Reading this made me realize I don't remember as much of the anime as I thought I did, but I was so thrilled to see any Witch of Mercury doujin at all…! The opening pages, with a wordless dream sequence that starts with Suletta floating in space before waking up in her hospital bed are particularly memorable. It is neither a requirement or even always desirable for a doujinshi to hew closely to the canon designs, but here I was impressed with how close Xed kept the art to what you see in Witch from Mercury's anime. No small feat given that Suletta and Miorine both have frankly unreasonable amount of Anime Hair.

"Happiness" (Land of the Lustrous, with sketches from Elien/@_neile)

Xed's comic shows that they have a really strong grasp on the shoujo paneling tradition, with lots of organic movement that carries you across the page, and it makes the moments when they return to square/rectangular panels particularly powerful. The whole fancomic portion is an ode to Houseki no Kuni's complicated and deeply conceptual ending. It feels like a prayer for a kinder world, one that doesn't exist, that may never exist, that we nevertheless want to exist, if not for ourselves, then for others, except a dream like this always contains in it a kernel of selfishness, a desire that the better world we worked hard for had existed for us too, so that we need not have ever learned the importance of striving for that better world. That's what Phosphophyllite's happiness means to me and, I think, to Xed too.

You can order physical copies of Xed's doujinshi from their website!

Three original comics/doujins/zines.

"When the tide returns," by vivinhun

Caught me instantly with the vision test imagery in the opening, so i knew I had to have a copy. What awaited me inside is a wonderful exercise in elision. Minh, a memory worker, is told that he has been "processing too many memories" and should see a specialist, Dr. Rivera, who lives in a lighthouse. He brings along two kids (Kamon and Luka), whose relationship to Minh is never explained. The comic depicts a simple outing: collecting shells by the water, making a meal with friends, a quiet conversation, but there's a sense of something disquieting just outside the four corners of this oneshot. What is a memory worker? What is Dr. Rivera a specialist of? Is it so bad for our memories to soften over time, so that it is hard to tell what are our real memories and what are stories others have told us? Even the art hides mysteries. Though the images look at first like loose pencil sketches, the more you read the more you realize they aren't the first draft of a storyboard but rather fully formed and planned panels that are then re-rendered in pencil (a suspicion collaborated by the artist in the afterword).

Incidentally, prior to this trip to San Jose, I had just finished a video essay exploring the origins of the images used in the autorefractor machines, including the red barn image with which vivi opens "When the tide returns." The video essay creator talks about having bad eyesight all his life and developing a personal connection with the red barn test image. When he discovers that it was based on a real, still-standing structure, he makes a pilgrimage to the farm on which it is located. Everything about it is different now. There are no fences, and the barn isn't even red (it's likely the red was added to the photograph for the autorefractor image). But he is still excited to be there. "It's real," he keeps saying. "It's a crazy feeling to be here."

I don't know if vivi has watched this video too, or if they, the video essayist, and I all have bad eyesight and an affinity for this red barn image, if this is all just a coincidence, random threads I am tying together to make meaning. But I can't stop thinking about how photographs are like a memory someone else has of you which you then internalize as your own memory, that every image is real, and not real (just like the pencil sketches in this comic are real, but not real), that a place can be "realer" in your memory than in reality, that sometimes we have to live and breathe and feel in the present to be able to properly "see" the past, that every reality is reconstructed. When I read vivi's afterword, many things fell into place: this is a story about navigating transience, how to make peace with becoming a cracked vessel for the experiences and memories we accumulate and, inevitably, lose hold of.

You can preorder this comic from vivi's website.

"Transient Solids," sketches from ketsal

In case you can't read it from the picture, the blurb on the front says:

drawings from sketchbooks (physical) that were edited (digitally) and then printed (physically)

… which really felt like a sign of the times! So many works at Manga Ichiba feel like they exist in that in between space of paper and digital. These days, digital distribution is easy, and we could technically have a digital only doujin event (and you do in fact see this all the time, both in the English-speaking and non-English speaking spaces), which would cut out all the issues that go into printing and flying into a physical space and tabling. But that friction is part of the appeal, isn't it? Picking up a book, feeling the weight of cardstock, commiserating about ordinary home printers that aren't up to the task, the thrill of getting something that may only be printed and available physically this one time—I understand this appeal now!

Anyway, I picked this book up because the first page I flipped to was a doodle of a bowl of chazuke, which ketsal mentions they first tried because it came up in "Run with the Wind." I do that too, making food because it comes up in a series I am reading, so it made me feel great kinship to them. Imagine my surprise when later that evening, I turned the page only to find that ketsal had also doodled some characters from Sugiura Shiho's "Silver Diamond," which is their #1 manga and one of my all-time favorites as well! It's these little moments that made Manga Ichiba so fulfilling to me. ketsal, if you are reading this, I hope you know there are dozen of us Sugiura fans! Dozens of us!!

"I will teach you how to fish." by halveablock

My absolute favorite of the halveablock doujins I bought, and weirdly in dialogue with vivinhun's "When the tide returns," with themes of memory and disorientation... the letting go of something you were trying to grasp of the past so that you can be the "you" of the present... and fishing.... Most of the action focuses on main character Mael trying to gut a fish that has been infected with something called barnacle sickness, which causes it to grow eyes all over its body.

This doujin is beautifully produced, with a striking cover that has a cutout window so you can see the risograph page inside. The limited uses of red and blue, sometimes purposefully offset from the black outlines, add to the sense of unease. There's a feeling in the story like you are clearing your head after being punched, and you know you have a few screws knocked loose in your head, but you don't know where they are and what they used to hold together. The style, both art and paneling, feels more like "western" comics, maybe a little touch of the Vertical imprint, and I say this as a compliment. You know I love a metaphor that's all about fish death, and this delivered in spades. Fantastic execution — creepy, murky, kind of "Blue Submarine No. 6"-ish.

You can, as mentioned above, get physical copies of Xed's doujinshi from their website, but a digital version of this comic is also available for purchase!

Collection of doujins from durian soda / Lina.

I'm lucky enough to claim Lina as a personal friend whose art I have always admired, so naturally I am biased when it comes to talking about her work. She is not only enormously talented but also prolific and had so many books (and fans!!) at her table that visiting her during the Friday night session felt like being in the presence of a minor celebrity. She draws so much, it's disgusting (I say this with a beatific smile). I already purchased "Bad Luck Angel" when Lina first released it on her website, and I bought the Haikevah artbook for a friend, so I'm really only reviewing two of the works below.

"Lucky": I am the only fujoshi in the world for whom "Heated Rivalry" did not hit (or at least that's what it sometimes feels like), but I love Lina's continued dedication to pushing out multiple storyboards where all the characters do is fuck, beautifully and a little athletically. Ilya's voice here is very good, punchable but sweet, and I love her super hot anime-boy rendition of Shane, who is so extremely uke-coded in this that you are tempted to join in with Hudson's deranged fantasies of a sex scene where he tops his own character. My favorite detail is how large and round Lina drew Shane's thighs during the blowjob, which are exactly the kind of quads that made specialty tailors for hockey players a real thing. The only thing that could make this better is if Shane also got a beautifully rendered sparkling asshole, a la nocori. Next time!

"Hot New Thing": If you know Lina irl you know that she is a raucous tumbleweed of irreverent humor, so it's no surprise that I love this doujin so much because it is outrageously funny. There is a sequence here where one of the characters has a cinematic daydream about his Labubu avatar getting cucked and it may be my favorite two pages from this haul. Shun, the main character, is such a devilish virgin(?) bottom who accidentally sows enormous chaos in the heart and mind of his best friend Take who has had the misfortune of being in love with him. They are idiots and I wish them a happy life together. Side note: Shun's idol is an Ayer-senpai who I think maybe a crossover from Lina's other original doujinshi, "Bad Luck Angel!"

You can get ALL of the doujinshi pictured and more!! from Lina's website.

"Craving," by juliegg

I love Julie carrying on the great doujin tradition of writing a special issue for a doujin event that's just their own OCs fucking. This is a very important ritual and with it, we baptize Manga Ichiba properly. Breeze once wrote in their report that there is a characteristic "fujo-grin" that one sees on the face of a reader who is enjoying something very perverted. If someone had seen me after I finished reading "Craving," I suspect I would have had just such a wicked fujo-grin on my face. To be honest, I am not a cat boy aficionado, but I bought this on the strength of Julie's own enthusiasm, and I loved flipping to the author's notes afterwards, because all of her favorite parts were my favorite parts, including and ESPECIALLY the part where Rui rubbed his tail on Kouta's tip. Julie… perhaps you are a genius…..

You can buy "Craving" online at Julie's website.

"Possession Session," by faiell

Vincent is a shaman with a crush on an influencer (?) named Sydney, whose girlfriend Mira died in a freak car accident. Vincent offers to take Sydney on as a client and let Mira possess his body, nominally under the banner of grief counseling, but Sydney (and Mira-in-Vincent's-body) choose to use that time to have a marathon sex session.

This doujin features my hands down favorite cover—the color combination, the striking placement of the title, the placement of the earring across Vincent's face suggesting that he is perhaps levitating sidewise, the hands (his own? Sydney's?) by his neck as if threatening strangulation. I love that Vincent's tongue is almost split by one of the letters and I am exercising great restraint into trying not to read too deeply into that design choice. Sydney is such an unrepentant scumbag that of course he's also a livestreamer, like bro please stop streaming your girlfriend's funeral?! His utter indifference to showing any care or decorum for Vincent is tragic, and flipping to the end where Fai writes that Vincent is "the type of guy who mistakes lust for love" felt like the sudden sense of doom when you realize you've accidentally eaten expired food. Poor Vincent, you are too gorgeous and slutty and lovingly designed by your creator to suffer this asshole, no matter how much his appearance may remind me of a Gen Z Char Aznable!!

You can preorder a copy of "Possession Session" at Fai's website!

"forever and always" by arestinnia (Jujutsu Kaisen, Fushiguro/Itadori)

This is a post-canon/Modulo!era Megumi/Yuji doujinshi and one of the ones I was most looking forward to buying from Manga Ichiba when the circle cuts came out. Arestinnia's style is so accurate to Akutami's own, especially in the very opening page where Maki is scolding Yuji for not accepting a compliment and a fabulous middle sequence where Yuji is eradicating cursed spirits but is caught by Megumi, who has come in his child form to fetch Yuji. It's of course a wonderful tribute to the sequence in the manga where Yuji tells child!Megumi that it is lonely without him, but with a bittersweet twist (Megumi accepts that he cannot bring Yuji with him, as Yuji is determined to remain on earth and do good). I'm always sad when I think about Modulo!Yuji, who will have to experience the death of everyone he has ever loved, but I wonder if in arestinnia's world, spirit!Megumi will come and sit with Yuji occasionally, get ice cream with him and get scolded by Maki with him and just be not alone. It might make the many years Yuji has left go down more easily.

As of this writing, "forever and always" is not available for purchase, but arestinnia has indicated they will put it up on pixiv!

"Sorcery Fuck", by Some Mollusk (Jujutsu Kaisen, Todo/Itadori)

Incredible premise that is based on the artist's own fanfic (!!): Todo and Yuji are sent to Tokyo Bigsight where they have to get rid of some cursed spirits, among which is the Comiket Curse, which immediately traps them in a fujoshi domain expansion where they can only leave if they have—and this Yuji and Todo test exhaustively—fully penetrative penis-in-asshole sex.

Y'all this doujin is HUGE in size (and surprisingly lengthy in page count too!). I know there was some discussion about the expectation of how big a doujin "should" be, but "Sorcery Fuck" is the largest of all the books I bought, so big that I was able to fold up my "Happy Birthday Kim Dokja" poster from BeAl2O4EA08 in it. I love the concept of a Comiket curse that instantly traps any two hot men standing five feet apart (and thus, of course, gay) into a "fuck or die" room, and I love Some Mollusk understanding the assignment and bringing that as their Manga Ichiba offering.

I also enjoyed comparing these two JJK doujins, because it shows that there are as many approaches to doujinshi as there are creators and fans in the world. "forever and always" hews closely to Akutami's style, down to the lettering, and feels like such a natural extension of the canon, while "Sorcery Fuck" has the romp-like energy of a digital extra at the end of a two-volume bl. Some Mollusk's art style and panelling feels more western and has the miles-of-jokes-per-second rhythm of a very well-edited commentary video. I don't know how to explain, but there are pages where you almost can hear the Vine boom sound effect. I mean this all extremely positively—it's very hard to keep up a constant level of humor and hijinks in a story that's almost entirely porn. Every time I revisit this doujin to write about it, I notice a new punch-line worthy joke that Some Mollusk throws in there like it's no big deal at all: the Comiket Curse dropping an anal plug when it's fighting Yuji, Sukuna giving Yuji the middle finger from beyond the grave, a doodle of Takada-chan in a lab coat explaining time dilation. This time around, my favorite joke is Yuji wringing the neck of a fleshlight and picturing a hamster trying to deep-throat a banana when he sees Todo's, ahem, assets for the first time.

As of this writing, "Sorcery Fuck" is not available online or for purchase.

"Making Peace," by banditry (Metal Gear Solid V)

Val is another personal friend, so again my effusive praise may lack objectivity, but I sincerely believe their work, as shown in this edition of "Making Peace," is on another style level. That they printed and bound the comic on their own, so that they could use kraft paper and Acco fasteners that would be thematically in line with the aesthetics of MGS, is just the beginning. "Making Peace" is for sure more "graphic novel" than it is "manga": each double-page spread features a different wash of color and central image, around which Val has positioned text (sometimes in dialogue bubbles, but usually not). You can take in the comic casually and quickly, letting the artful touches of color, bold images, and measured prose wash over you, or you can scour each page desperately, picking it apart for hidden meaning: the diagetic section numbers, the recurring circle-and-intersecting-line imagery that echoes the individual elements of the peace sign (another meaning to "making" "peace"), the obsession with eyes and glasses. "There's layers," Val writes in the afterword about MGSV, which is the same thing I'd say about their comic.

I am not a MGS fan (for reasons that are too boring to get into, I have basically only played about five video games in my life), and I'm only vaguely familiar with the characters in "Making Peace," but I think there is in both the comic and the making of the comic (and my own experience reading it) something about the theme of having to make peace with one's own limitations, and how our lives are shaped as much by what we cannot do as it is by what we end up doing. To make peace is, inherently, positive: to lay a conflict down to rest, to cast off one's dissatisfaction, to be able to move on. But it is also, inherently, a surrender, an admission that there is nothing more that you can do—if, indeed, there was ever at all. But that struggle may only be legible to ourselves. When we look too closely at ourselves we often only see the flaws. From the outside, one only sees the success of a turmoil ending, an achievement obtained. Just like I from the outside can only see how ambitious, how beautiful, how perfectly formed "Making Peace" is.

As of this writing, "Making Peace" is not available for purchase, but (UPDATE!!) Val has made it available online!

"Hitchhiker," by yiyuehua (My S-Class Heroes, guideverse AU, HJYJ)

"Hitchhiker" is an illustrated doujin version of a previously published fanfic, with a special bonus at the end that is in more traditional manga form. The story opens on Yoojin driving in the rain and coming across Sung Hyunje, who derails Yoojin's car and forces himself inside. Hyunje is an S-class esper and injured, and of course Yoojin is an S-class guide (masquerading as an F-class guide and undertaker), and of course they end up fucking, though one could hardly call it good, giving, or game.

To be honest, I was at a loss for a while about what to write about "Hitchhiker," but that is because it is just plain delicious, the kind of old-fashioned meat-and-potatoes slash content on which I grew up and to which I still gravitate. Yiyuehua's writing and art are perfectly tuned to bl novel or webtoon sensibilities. You would, I think, believe me in a second if I told you this was on Publang or Tappytoon, and if it were, I would have subscribed in a heartbeat. Alas, "Hitchhiker" remains regrettably only a snapshot from a much larger story that exists as of now only in Yiyuehua's mind, though there are so many tasty details that I feel like a dying man being drip-fed a mirage. How did Yoohyun die, and is Yoojin capable of necromancy, and oh my god, is his dead brother's body really rotting—or reanimating—in the trunk of his car while he and Sung Hyunje fuck? Many questions that I hope against hope Yiyuehua will one day answer.

As of this writing, "Hitchhiker" is not available for purchase, but with some simple Googling, you can find the fanfic online.

"As You Wish," by saltcheee

"As You Wish" stars Cain, a royal magician, and his pet demon Yohan (Johann, maybe?). One of them has made a pact with a demon for great, perhaps unbearable power, in return for a promise, though who and what that promise is remains a mystery to the reader until the end.

I am not exaggerating when I say that reading this (at times through Google Translate) made me feel like I was dying. Salt, I think you need to get serialized… I think you need to go pro… I think you need to make that your number one priority because every aspect of this doujin fooled me into thinking I was reading the second chapter of a bl manga in a commercial magazine. The sequences with the demon and the promise felt like moments from episode 8 of Sonny Boy, the one with Yamabiko the talking dog, and the overall feel of "As You Wish" reminded me of Bikke's "Shinkuu Yuusetsu," also about two magical not-quite-lovers and not-quite-friends. Though the pages tend to be sparse, lots of white and implied backgrounds with screentones, it's the same kind of movement through space and panels that you'd see in any professional work. Like I truly cannot emphasize enough how much this felt so beholden and in harmony with the technical aspects of Japanese bl!! I also want to give a special shoutout to the character designs. Though a lot of the story feels vaguely fantasy Europe, with vaulted ceilings and tympanums along with the very European names, all the characters are wearing cheongsam-inspired robes inside their hooded coats. A very fun detail!

As of this writing, "As You Wish" is not available for purchase, but you can read a lengthy preview of it on pixiv.

"Game Show," by yanyan46e20 and BeAl2O4EA08 (ORV x MSCH crossover)

I'm sure both artists do not want to hear this from me, but unfortunately I would eat up 20 pages of this. No, 25 pages. No, 50!! Every page had a little something that made me laugh, from Yoo Joonghyuk immediately saying "KIM DOKJA" in an irritated voice when the game show starts (with a footnote that he says it as if this whole thing is somehow automatically Dokja's fault) to Uriel and Yoohyun in the audience cheering on their respective faves to the bonus cute off at the end (PRECIOUS. AMAZING. 10/10). This is short, and silly, and full of warmth for both canons. It is no exaggeration that I wanted to make sure I was early in line for Saturday's evening session just to make sure I could get a copy, and I do not regret it at all. I think the authors should consider letting Bihyung and Newcomer brainstorm more Situations to put our characters in. I think that would bring about world peace, really.

As of this writing, "Game Show" is not available online or for purchase.

"Daydream," by BeAl2O4EA08 (ORV, Joongdak)

The side benefit of having been almost first in line at BeAl2O4EA08's table is that I got to buy a copy of "Daydream." Saturday PM session of Manga Ichiba was perhaps not the bloodbath that Sunday PM became, but it was still busy enough that I didn't linger at the table, so I wasn't able to tell BeAl2O4EA08 how extremely legit everything about "Daydream" is. The binding, the design, the colored end pages, the heft. It is so luxurious and, yes, dreamy. I don't know if BeAl2O4EA08 ever intends to reprint it, but if you get a chance to buy it, please do.

As for the story itself, it is genuinely one of my favorite tropes, the dream that is not a dream, two lives intersecting at cross purposes, two people who can only meet in a place that operates on dream logic (extra special because it is ORV, of course) and desperately trying to grab onto each other. I know the Mandarin text ("Daydream" is presented bilingually!) is skewing the feeling, but "Daydream" reminds me a lot of Korean webtoons and Chinese manhua, with big panels that move almost exclusively vertically down the page and the frequent use of full-page images to break up the rhythm. My favorite sequence is when Joonghyuk and Dokja kiss in a subway car filling up with water, but, well, I am an "Adolescence of Utena" superfan after all. Reading "Daydream" made me think of the ways Utena and ORV are similar, about the ways we create our heroes and then desire our own created heroes only for them to in turn desire us, the idea of the End of the World as both an ending and the beginning, and the soft spaces in our subconscious where desire reigns, where we cannot turn away from our desire, where we are exposed by our desire, and how harrowing that can be.

As of this writing, I think "Daydream" is no longer available for purchase, though there was a reprint interest check previously. Perhaps there will be a re-reprint interest check!

"Merry Bad End Boy," by mousouhousou/Convenience Store Pudding

So, a confession: when I made a note to buy this, I didn't realize it would be het/NL. That said, this was such uproarious fun that I am very happy I own a copy. Mosouhousou presents most of this story as a series of 4-koma, and it's good to see that The Traditions Are Still Alive. I often joke that a lot of modern tropes I see in bl manga are actually expressions of our desire to escape capitalism (like for instance when a character you pick up off the street turns out to be your perfect housewife who heals your body and soul and that allows you to get promoted and/or escape from your toxic work environment). Here, mousouhousou quite explicitly explores that fantasy in the context of a yandere boyfriend. Naturally, my favorite sequence is "Do you do taxes, too?" where the yandere boyfriend helps the main character get a reimbursement for a client dinner because he knows where all her receipts and bank statements are.

There is a kind of "twist" ending which I will not spoil, but suffice to say, this is such a fun and unintentionally biting look into modern romance. What do today's heterosexual women want their partners to provide? It is not the fantasy of romance, which the main character (and many other heterosexual women like me!) finds in fiction. It is not the trappings of material luxury, like a house or money or a car, which we often can provide for ourselves. Instead, what we long for is a partner who is curious and attentive to us, who sees us both in our public and most unguarded private moments, who is willing to get a little silly with us, who takes initiative and does not wait for our direction or approval. The yandere is the crooked interpretation of that desire, but it is still nevertheless a manifestation of that desire, and "Merry Bad End Boy" understands that perfectly.

As of this writing, "Merry Bad End Boy" is not available, but a digital version of it will be available for purchase soon!

Three "Ace of Diamond" doujinshi by hongslice/tigrbalm.

I hope I did not embarrass/overwhelm Steph at her table by asking for copies of all three doujinshi as well as sticker sheets and a keychain. But it is so unusual to see a KuraMiyu shipper in the wild! Actually while I was at her table, one attendee was explaining to their friend that "usually people ship him (pointing to Miyuki) and him (pointing to Sawamura) together" and I wanted to butt in and shout BUT THAT'S WHY YOU NEED TO SUPPORT HONGSLICE, DON'T YOU SEE? But I am a fake fan who still hasn't fully finished Daiya Act I. Perhaps next year, Steph will come back, and I will act as a proper missionary!

"Where You Are": This is the KuraMiyu doujin hongslice wrote special for Manga Ichiba, featuring university student Kuramochi who is making new friends and professional player Miyuki who is learning that he gets jealous. This is one of my favorite happy-sad sports pairing scenarios too, because I am a sicko and this is essentially forcing a pairing to live through an ersatz breakup. "I am waiting for the day we can play together again" is "Even if you move on, I'll always love you," and "I'll always be cheering you on fron the sidelines" is "it's not you, it's me," but in sports anime/manga terms. I wish for nothing but delicious bittersweet happiness for these two forever.

"A Cat's Interlude": Sawamura fosters a stray cat, and Furuya gets involved, because he loves cats and also he loves Sawamura. I actually put my hand to my mouth when I got to the end of this doujinshi, because Furuya??? Are you OK???? I felt extremely Sawamura-kin at that moment, wanting to yell and hug Furuya in equal measures. You know, maybe only Sawamura could put up with this Furuya's silliness. Congratulations on your marriage.

"A Show of Love": Sawamura and Furuya have been dating on the down low for a while, so as not to impact their professional careers. Furuya wants to go public with their relationship, despite Sawamura's concerns, so Sawamura makes a bet with him: if he can hit a homer off of Narumiya in their next game, then they can announce they're dating. This has the same kind of story beat as the Scott and Kip subplot in "Heated Rivalry" and, well, that formula works for a reason and it works here! As a person who has adopted Narumiya Mei as her patron saint, I too felt bad for him being the unwitting and unwilling catalyst for this bakappuru but some sacrifices must be made. I also feel like this is the most artistically ambitious of the three doujins, with actual!! scenes of baseball!

As of this writing, I don't believe any of these doujin are available online or for purchase, but Steph does have a storefront.

"Quod Ames," by tomatobird

I have been so thankful to Tomato for their continued promotion of Manga Ichiba and unofficial guides to the event which predated the Fanime info dumps for weeks. It is because of them that I was prepared to attend the event at all, and undoubtedly one of the highlights from that weekend was getting to meet them in person and briefly monopolizing their time at the help desk. I had told them previously that I unfortunately was flying out of San Jose before the Sunday PM session and would miss getting a chance to buy their doujin in person, and they surprised me by bringing a copy of "Quod Ames" to the Saturday day session so I could buy an advance copy!

The minute I opened "Quod Ames," I was reminded of a zine I had read a while back, "Best Yaoi Movies of the 20th Century," and I was going to message Tomato about it. But then I did the diligent thing of checking the bylines on "Best Yaoi Movies" and wouldn't you know it? Tomato was a co-author, and was the author of the blurb on "The Lion in Winter." I love when a person has a cohesive aesthetic sense, a throughline of interests and influences which they telegraph loudly, and what little I know of tomato, they seem just such a person.

I too am a fan of "The Lion in Winter" (and "Beckett" and "Lawrence of Arabia"), so unsurprisingly, I am a fan of "Quod Ames" as well, which explores a possible romantic relationship between Phillip II of France and Richard I of England. I love Philippe, who is naive and doesn't know it and, when made uncomfortable, does not hesitate to resort to minor cruelty to regain equilibrium. Much of this first part of "Quod Ames" are Philippe's fantasies, and he has two: one where he allows Richard to bed him, and another where he is a haughty authority figure and Richard, abject and groveling, kisses the edge of his robes. Both are rendered like illustrated manuscripts or stained glass windows, eschewing traditional paneling for a fecund tangle of vines and limbs and memories, a profane iconography that is so unique and fitting for the subject matter. I cannot wait for Part 2, and I hope it is not long coming.

You can buy a physical or digital copy of "Quod Ames"!

Some miscellaneous small zines:

"Catte," by Eastern Downpour: I have been telling everyone that this is the most important zine I bought the whole weekend. It is so precious and filled with the artist's particular sensibilities. I only wish they had put their socials somewhere on the zine itself!

"Shipping Patterns," by puppetbomb: Perfect execution mimicking the Campus notebook branding and design, and featuring doodles of their favorite pairings throughout the years as if you are flipping through a private notebook. I'm seethingly jealous I didn't think of it myself.

"The Love of the Game," by poxei/nico/vivi: I love all three artists and in fact have bought art from poxei and nico previously/separately. This beautifully printed 8-fold features art from six different sports anime/manga, including Prince of Tennis (!) and 100 Meters (!!). I can't wait to get the OC zine from the half dozen collective later this year!

LOGH pamphlet, by cathartesaurora and cyr: Amazing and inspirational. I am already brainstorming what I could do that's similar for next Manga Ichiba. Every table should have their own pamphlet. I am so serious, we should have a Pamphlet Phest.

So it may surprise you to learn that "Gray to Blue no Aimade" is actually a love story between Koushi and Koutarou's aforementioned student, a hotheaded romantic with a bit of a libertine streak named Sayotani Masatora. Koushi saves Masatora from a physical altercation and accidentally takes a page out of the pick-up artist bible by negging Masatora in the process. This, predictably, works like a stick of dynamite on Masatora, who begins stalking Koushi to his local coffeeshop and desperately trying to get Koushi to acknowledge him as a possible love interest. Unnerved and unwilling to get caught up with a man—no, boy—much, much younger than him, Koushi resolutely rejects Masatora, until a series of coincidences leads Koutarou to realize Masatora's new crush is none other than his elderly father-in-law. Koutarou tries to give both Koushi and Masatora a lecture about propriety that backfires spectacularly. In the middle of all this gay drama, Haruka calls Koutarou from New York: she's coming back to Japan, she's fallen for another man, and she wants a divorce.

As a straight man in a bl manga, no matter how much Koutarou is set up to be the main character and a force for good, he is still a figure of impotence. Though he channels the meddling, overly-invested spirit of a bl love interest in his interactions with Koushi, he lacks follow-through. He is like an insect drawn to a light behind glass, unable to consummate his desires, no matter how much he may beat his wings against the barriers of his own heterosexuality. By the end of the series, with no other options, Itoi dooms Koutarou to his troubled marriage with Haruka. He is a cuckolded husband who cannot get angry at his wife's infidelity, who is blind to the tenderness and heartsickness Koushi projects onto him. That is for Masatora, who instantly clocks that even at his big age Koushi is not above crushing on a straight man who can't love him back. Koutarou is tragically, almost constitutionally barred from the world of gay romance. His one great act of shamelessness is simply to ask his father-in-law to remain his friend. This is all Koutarou can imagine and ask for. He has no imagination for anything more. 

It's not a kind fate, but it is a necessary one. Koutarou's straightness, his impotence, is also a refuge for Koushi. No matter how perverse his feelings may be, no matter how much he may be trying to reenact the trauma of his first love, no matter how much he begs for Koutarou to mistreat him, Koushi cannot alter Koutarou. For Koutarou, Koushi is his wife's father, and no amount of sad gay attempts at self-debasement can erase that. In a way, this echoes Koushi's final capitulation to Masatora. Koushi is surrounded on both sides with men who maintain a light in their hearts, a brightness in their worlds, and who are determined to bring Koushi into that light with them. They see Koushi in all his negativity and determination to be alone, and they remain unmoved in their intentions for him. One could do far worse, to be surrounded with such love at Koushi's age.

"Gray to Blue" is full of interesting in-betweens, secret third things that defy its characters' attempts to find refuge in convention or a more obvious unconvention. Masatora is presented at first as willowy, long-haired, almost uke-coded, but by the end of the series he is an enthusiastic short-haired younger top who happily discusses domming Koushi in the future. Koushi is a respectable older man who raised a young daughter all on his own, and also kind of an unrepentant slut who is trying to make up for lost time. At the center of it all is Koutarou, the "in-between" hinted at by the title ("what lies between gray and blue"). The "gray" is a reference to Koushi, of course, and the "blue" to the youth/seishun of Masatora. And between the two is Koutarou, a bridge who is neither the third leg of the triangle nor bystander/cheerleader, yet somehow all that and more. Koutarou is rival and mentor and friend and former romantic interest and confidant and disapproving adult to Masatora. Though Koutarou has little romantic experience, it is only because of his steadfast straightness that he could be a safe harbor into which Koushi could wash, to prepare Koushi to open his heart to Masatora. "Gray to Blue" would not have worked without him, or rather, without him it would not have stood out, even with the dramatic age gap between Koushi and Masatora. Sometimes your guardian angel is a painfully straight history teacher who is your son-in-law. What a concept!

What if we take all the elements of "Gray to Blue no Aimade" and remixed them? What if Koutarou and Koushi have been in a secret third thing for years, but that secret third thing was psychologically confusing and toxic, and Masatora purposefully drops himself into the center of it in order to seduce one of them, only to come out the other end fully involved with both of them?

Well, then, you might have Psyche Delico's "Inu mo Kuwanai," whose title is a reference to the Japanese idiom that "even a dog won't eat a marital quarrel" (fūfu-genka wa inu mo kuwanai). It's surprisingly similar to another allusion to dogs and quarrels in the Bible of all places: it's better to take hold of a mad dog by the ears than to take part in someone else's argument (Proverbs 26:17). The mad dog in question is Utsugi, a private investigator who is hired by Professor Yamashiro to find proof that his wife is committing adultery. What Utsugi ends up uncovering, however, is a long-standing rivalry-cum-obsessionship between Yamashiro and his colleague Okuzono, who has stolen every single one of Yamashiro's romantic partners from him since high school. Unbeknownst to Yamashiro, however, Utsugi has his own reasons for wanting to get involved; ten years ago, he had met and fallen in love with Okuzono, only to be rejected. Now, he sees a perfect opportunity to get Okuzono to fall for him: enter into a fake-dating relationship with Yamashiro to catch Okuzono's attention, killing two birds with one stone.

Dogs may turn their noses at marital quarrels, but Psyche Delico has never met a weird triangle dynamic that she wouldn't eat up. When people talk about love triangles, they usually mean a V-shaped dynamic, where two people are in love with one person whose ultimate selection of a victor collapses the whole shape. Not so with Psyche Delico's characters, who always twist themselves into the most complex knots, locking the triangular framework into place. In her stories, characters do not mislead or cheat or secretly carry on an affair. Instead, they throw all their cards on the table, and the story's delights come from Psyche Delico shuffling the deck and dealing out the hands.

In "Inu mo Kuwanai," all three main characters are perfectly aware of the game(s) they each are playing, yet are unable to resist stepping into the Saw-like emotional traps designed specifically for them. Utsugi cannot resist chasing after a second chance with a man who rejected him, Yamashiro's guilt over throwing his past romantic partners unwittingly into the maw of Okuzono's obsession leaves him vulnerable to Utsugi's manipulations, and Okuzono would never turn down a chance to fuck with Yamashiro, as long as it doesn't involve actually fucking Yamashiro.

The point of both dog-related idioms is, of course, that a sensible person should stay out of other people's business, to which Utsugi is very "the sign can't stop me because I can't read." Utsugi is a meddler and once given the opportunity cannot help but dig deep into Yamashiro and Okuzono's shared history. He's a private investigator after all. Yet Psyche Delico pulls a similar trick to Itoi Nozo in the story's resolution. Like Koushi hiding from Masatora the aftermath of his first love and his projection of that disaster onto Koutarou, Okuzono denies Utsugi (and the audience) any real insight into how he feels about the end of his relationship with Yamashiro. "That's an answer I'll carry alone to my grave," Okuzono tells Utsugi. "I'm not interested in discussing the details with you." To the very end, Okuzono is possessive, secretive, selfish. His relationship with Yamashiro is for him, not for Utsugi, and in a way, not even for Yamashiro. 

So what is the thing that Okuzono comes to accept about himself and Yamashiro? I think the solution lies in chapter four, when Utsugi approaches Okuzono and Okuzono explains why he steals Yamashiro's things. "I felt like anything Yamashiro touched was somehow special," Okuzono explains. Later, as he traces the kiss marks on Utsugi's body left behind by Yamashiro, he says, "You have a splendid body. He really does have exquisite taste." 

Yamashiro claims that Okuzono is the kind of person who loses interest once he has a thing he has been chasing. "That is why I have to keep running away," he tells Utsugi with a rueful smile. But that's not entirely true, is it? The only things in which Okuzono has lost interest are the things that Yamashiro has cast aside. In short, they are not-Yamashiro. By consuming the things Yamashiro consumed, Okuzono hopes to become like Yamashiro—a man with exquisite taste. But he also longs to be the person touched by Yamashiro, chosen by Yamashiro, consumed by Yamashiro, because then he too would be transformed into something special. It's no coincidence that after having his love acknowledged by Yamashiro, Okuzono seeks out the only other man who admired him before knowing Yamashiro even existed. 

Both Okuzono and Yamashiro seem to want to diagnose their relationship as avoidant and elusive, when in fact I think the truth is far simpler: Okuzono is a narcissist who wants to satisfy his own ego, and Yamashiro got too carried away by the attention to put his foot down. That they carry on this way into their big age is embarrassing, but also endearing and, unfortunately, relatable. Who among us wouldn't be just a little bit flattered by the prospect of being someone's decades-long unrequited crush or wouldn't thrill at the chance of playing the tragic romantic lead who has loved one unattainable man for years? 

Perhaps that's why at the end of "Inu mo Kuwanai," Utsugi goes to Yamashiro again with an unusual proposition: what if Yamashiro were to steal something (that is, Utsugi) from Okuzono? In doing so, Utsugi reifies his own worth as a participant in this triangle, instead of just a prize Okuzono earned by getting over Yamashiro, or a solution Yamashiro arrived at to get Okuzono off his case. Utsugi too is a messy bitch with an ego problem (positive), like all of Psyche Delico's best characters, and his reluctance to let this three-person party come to a close is what gives "Inu mo Kuwanai" that ineffable Psyche Delico touch. In Yamashiro's cheerful and steadfast acceptance of Utsugi's machinations and Okuzono's wicked, perverted personality, Utsugi has perhaps found his soulmates. Good for them, because no one else should have to deal with them!

"But Cathy, I am sick of secret third things," you might say. "I am sick of people who talk in riddles, who have sex with one person when they really want to be with another, who can't admit their feelings until it is too late or at all. And I am so sick of all these old men!" (You would never say that to me.) "Can you recommend something else?" you might say.

Well, once upon a time there was a mangaka named Yamagata Satomi. She specialized in a wispy, modern, yet very josei-adjacent style, full of men with long-ish hair half-pulled out of their faces, troubled teenagers skipping school, ambiguously romantic friendships and platonic situationships, rooms with two people lonely or together or lonely together while their faces are crossed with light. Her work is a successor to the "daughters of Garo" and a predecessor to more recent mangaka like Etsuko. In the 2000s, she published a slate of bl manga before transitioning entirely to josei. Of course she was licensed by June, and thus has fallen completely out of English language publication. Of course she has since gone into hiatus, and apparently hasn't written anything new since 2017. No one in the English fandom is probably reading Yamagata Satomi for the first time in 2026, which is, I think, a tragedy.

"Manic Love" (also known by its Japanese name "Kanjou Kairo," or Emotion Circuit) is the introspective teen drama mirror to "Gray to Blue to Aimade" and "Inu mo Kuwanai," one that only Yamagata Satomi would write. Its main character Maki is a high school student who has lost interest in his studies. He asks his teacher Mizuguchi to introduce him to a cram school, and Mizuguchi recommends one at which a specific math tutor named Haruji teaches. Maki is interested in Haruji's classes, but that interest then translates into interest in Haruji himself. Soon enough, Maki and Haruji are deep in a no-strings-attached sexual relationship. But when Maki reveals his relationship with Haruji to Mizuguchi, he learns that Mizuguchi and Haruji have a past, one that may have influenced Mizuguchi's decision to send Maki Haruji's way.

"Do you want to be him, or do you want to fuck him?" For all the softness or literary pretentiousness or psychological convolutedness of "Gray to Blue," "Inu mo Kuwanai," or "Manic Love," this is the crude, well-worn question that sits in the center of all three stories. And the answer is yes. These characters want to be each other, and want to fuck each other, and search desperately (fruitlessly?) for some secret third thing that is neither and both at the same time. Koushi wants to protect himself and protect the fragile relationships he has with Koutarou and Masatora by keeping them at a remove; to let Masatora see his weakness is to utterly destroy the sense of self he's spent years building. Yamashiro and Okuzono have spent their whole lives reenacting a dynamic they fossilized as teenagers, because to do anything else would force them to confront the things (time, energy, other people's affection) they have sacrificed just so they don't have to confront their own feelings. 

In "Manic Love," Yamagata Satomi poses this question in its most straightforward iteration yet. Mizuguchi met Haruji when Haruji was just barely older than Maki; now he sends Maki to Haruji, who is the same age Mizuguchi was when they first met. Maki is Mizuguchi's student, but he is not Mizuguchi. Will you treat him like I treated you? Mizuguchi seems to ask. Will you become me, or will you remain you and make Maki into me? "If I had known you were one of his students, I would have run away," Haruji grumbles to Maki when he realizes the trap that has been set for him. But like Yamashiro, even when he knows the trick being played, he cannot resist taking a bite of the forbidden fruit thrown his way.

Maki is the most elusive and powerful of the characters so far, proof that the miracle workers of bl are always the characters that can fully and shamelessly embody their desires. He wholeheartedly embraces the experiment Mizuguchi has signed him up for, but his solution seems not to be what Mizuguchi expected. Instead of offering Haruji a second chance, Maki is determined to repair what came before, to be a channel between Mizuguchi and Haruji, the "emotion circuit" that connects their hearts. He loves Haruji, as himself and as Mizuguchi's substitute, and as himself and also Haruji's substitute also learns to love Mizuguchi. Yamagata posits through Maki that just like with any other adult behavior, teenagers learn how to love by imitating—sometimes wholly becoming—the adult lovers around them. "I admired Mizuguchi's coolness," Maki muses to himself. But he cannot become Mizoguchi, if only because he cannot hold Haruji the way Mizuguchi could. In that gap between wanting to be the man to hold Haruji and being instead the boy that Haruji holds, Maki finally learns how to love and, predictably, gets his heart broken.

I'm sure this summary has raised many questions that you are hoping the story will answer. I had the same questions. Why squirting? Why a squirting squire? Like, in his videos, is Naito in a sexy knight costume? What is the premise? Does he wander the countryside making people squirt? With a sword? Does the sword he's holding on the cover of the DVD get used? Is that really enough to make him so popular that he's swarmed by a mixed-gender mixed-age all-demographics crowd the minute he goes out in public? Is he equally good at making men and women squirt, and if not, is it a transferable skill between the genders? Also, okay, Okuru says in the first chapter that semen is more potent than the tears, but "it's harder to use in actual battle," so that's why he saves his tears in vials to use during exorcism, but then how in the heck does he expect squirting to come into this equation? Does he have to save up the fluids that he emits from the squirting? How is that different from ejaculating into a vial? Or is he supposed to make himself squirt in the middle of an exorcism? And how did the exorcism community even arrive at the conclusion that squirting works better than semen? Who was doing the A/B testing?

Friends, these are not questions that "Yotsuya Ghost Knight" will answer. Instead, it will introduce even more questions that you did not even think to ask, because you understandably did not know the story would go there. Why is a side character named Ito-senpai who appears to have no connection to Okuru other than being a fellow exorcist so obsessed with Okuru, to the point of summoning an extremely powerful cursed spirit that possesses both Ito and Okuru? Why is Naito able to punch spirits in chapter one, an ability he never shows again? Why is Okuru, who is well-versed in understanding spirits and helping send them on their way, so convinced that his dead parents' spirits hold a grudge against him, when it is even obvious to Naito, a total stranger, that they like every other spirit have a lingering attachment they don't want to relinquish? And is Naito's protein powder business at the end sort of, ahem, semen-themed?

All this to say, "Yotsuya Ghost Knight" is a mess, a bunch of story elements thrown together and scrambled in between light-hearted (though very explicit) sex scenes. The headlights of its plot flicks aimlessly between character moments, never building tension or chemistry between any two characters. Okuru is a bog-standard introverted lead who gets in his own head and is described as being kind-hearted even though we really don't see him do anything particularly kind. But Shiroi Choco seems unwilling to make him truly negative or off-putting, so we're expected to believe this naïve and withdrawn boy draws in friends, obsessive stans, and a seasoned sex worker, even though his personality is thin to the point of translucent. The most interesting part of Okuru is his exorcism abilities, and we never get to see much of them. No paraphernalia, no talismans, no hand gestures to make seals—just Okuru making like a sprinkler all over some evil spirits. Likewise, I love AV actors in bl manga plots, but Naito's job is barely a footnote in a story where the whole premise hinges on him being an expert at making people squirt. 

I spend a lot of time trying to think deeply about the series I read for this blog, ruminating on themes and how to present them in unexpected ways, so that I can shoehorn them into what I see as broader themes in the genre. But it is sometimes fun (and humbling) to encounter a story that totally defies any of my attempts to say anything deeper. "Yotsuya Ghost Knight" is just such a story. Shiroi Choco is certainly competent as a mangaka, with an airy cute style that works for Okuru's teary-eyed uke faces and Naito's mole-inflected handsomeness. But how this of all series got licensed out of the sea of bl manga that is published every year is, I think, the true mystery of "Yotsuya Ghost Knight."

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500 words or not, I don't like ending any week on such a disappointed note. So let's pivot to something I read a little while back: Murasaki Hiro's "My Bad Painkiller," a story I can only describe as "My Little Inferno but written by someone who is not Asada Nemui." Mikuni Leo is sick of his life. He's plagued with debt he inherited from his parents, stuck in a dead-end job as a server in a diner, sexually harassed by boss, and is all around lonely and friendless. Believing himself utterly abandoned by God, he turns instead to the dark arts, hoping to summon a demon who will do his bidding. What he gets instead is an ex-con named Sakaki Amane, who is more than happy to take advantage of Leo's various offerings (food, body, and emotions) to get a foothold back into normal society.

The moment I knew that "My Bad Painkiller" would stay with me for a long, long time is when, in chapter two, Amane hunts down Leo's former bullies, uses them as a dartboard, and takes a picture to show Leo. "This is obscene," Leo says, trembling, and both the reader and Amane are prepared to believe this is a bridge too far for Leo. But as it turns out, Leo is deeply, deeply moved by the lengths Amane would go, both in terms of his cruelty and for Leo. "You are a demon," Leo tells Amane. "You are my savior." 

Leo and Amane have both rejected humanity—or, perhaps, believe humanity has rejected them both. Leo feels abandoned by God, his family, society, stuck in a bad place with no path to get out. Amane is a criminal with no family and a presumptive boss of the criminal underworld determined to bring Amane back into his fold. But the reality is that they crave a space where they can feel human, deserving of normal human emotions like love and validation. Like "My Little Inferno," the saving grace in a cruel world is a thin, treacherous path of normalcy. Leo and Amane live together, have sex with each other, and go on what could reasonably be described as "dates," but far from being romantic, these things feel like two people simply hanging out, enjoying if not each other's company, then each other's human warmth, like two animals snuggling together in the cold. They have been through too much to believe that another person could become their entire world or solve all of life's problems for them. Instead, they yearn for someone to be at their side, with whom life is just that little bit easier. 

In the final chapter, Amane's criminal underworld ex asks Amane one of the eternal questions of bl's rejected men: Why didn't you chose to me? What does he have that I don't? Amane, by then, had already ridden off, no prince on a white horse but a demon on a black motorbike with Leo safely seated behind him. The answer to the unnamed boss's question, then, comes in the form of a flashback to their younger days, when he had told Amane, "the key to living a lonely, unloved life is to fill that void with ill-gotten pleasures. And the only person who can give you that is me." This was, of course, the wrong answer. What Leo offers Amane is not love, necessarily, but a companionship in exigent circumstances that can be identical to love. His promise is to be with Amane, come police attention or high water. What Amane—and Leo—wants is not a solution to how to live lonely and unloved, but to no longer be lonely, no longer be unloved. 

This, I think, is one reason why "My Bad Painkiller" works for me in a way that "Yotsuya Ghost Knight" did not. Both feature characters trying to summon divine—or demonic—intervention to solve a nominal problem, only to bring into their lives a very human man who solves a problem they weren't even willing to articulate. "Yotsuya Ghost Knight" does this too straightforwardly. Naito's superpower ends up being, quite literally, the ability to make Okuru come as he never has before. (There's also, I guess, some "met as children once and forgot" side revelation, and you know how much I loathe this in a romance story.) But as powerful as exorcism through squirting is, it doesn't compare to the power of companionship in "My Bad Painkiller," which cannot transform the physical world around Leo and Amane but transforms them as people who can defy the world around them. Is Amane a demon? Does he have demonic powers? To the extent that demons are desire and the perverted fulfillment of desire made flesh, yes. But the true demon summoned is Leo himself, who despite being powerless and penniless and physical-prowess-less stands firm at Amane's side. With a gun pointed at him, at risk of losing his life, the only thing he truly has in his possession, he says, "Amane is my friend for life." Not "I love him," or "he belongs to me," but "no matter what, I am on his side." 

Dayoo's "Lovers on the Last Train" finds its main character Harue Shindo in just such a dilemma. At 42, he has never had a boyfriend—or any relationship, for that matter. Despite his bland exterior, his workaholic persona, and his total lack of dating history, Harue is a man of capacious, though cryptic, desire. In food as well as love, his eyes are bigger than his stomach. He wants a tonkatsu lunch set that he can't finish eating. He wants one more drink after overtime, before he has to go back to work the next morning. And he wants a fairytale forever love, but is terrified when it comes sauntering headfirst into his life in the form of Fujishima Yoshitaka, a suspiciously handsome wedding planner with whom Harue accidentally matched on a dating app.

There are no obstacles to Harue and Fujishima's love. They are attracted to each other instantly. They get along well. Fujishima is good-looking, outgoing, accommodating when it comes to Harue's inexperience, and finds Harue's purity and innocence one of his most attractive features, rather than something for which Harue should be ashamed. Harue, on the other hand, is straightforward, honest, and appreciative of Fujishima's romanticism and idealism. They spend a night in a hotel. They even manage, eventually, to exchange contact information. And yet, despite all this, the story comes to a standstill, as they try to navigate to the next step, which is not at all obvious even though they both, very obviously, like each other.

Harue is exactly who he says he is: 42, and gay, and a total virgin in love and sex. But so is Fujishima. He is 100% who he claims to be—it's just that who he claims to be seems impossible. Dayoo is not interested in unexpected or uncomfortable depths. There are no skeletons in Fujishima's closet, except for that of his pet cat who tragically passed away a month before the story begins and whose likeness Fujishima wears as a charm necklace. Faced with the 100% perfect man of his dreams, Harue experiences a total mental collapse. He was never immunized against love to begin with, and Fujishima's uncanny ability to catch Harue at just the right moment and sweep Harue off his feet leads Harue down the path of foolish behavior. He finds himself googling "what does it mean to hold hands with someone in a dream?" Instead of drinking a juicebox gifted to him by Fujishima, he stores it in his own fridge for over a week. He starts to worry about the way he looks, the way he smells. Desperate to present his best possible self to Fujishima, he doesn't realize that the only thing Fujishima really wants from him is to simply show up as himself. There is no better way to kill momentum than through overthinking, and Harue's overthinking ends up tying Fujishima into knots with him.

If vulnerability is showing yourself as you really are, opening up your soft underbelly trusting that it will not be torn to shreds, then there is incredible vulnerability in asking for exactly what you want. Not what you think you should want, and not what you think you deserve, but what you think good and lovely and want for yourself. As we get older, we become accustomed to not getting what we want. Eventually, we stop even asking. "When you want something but it's just outside of reach, and you think you can handle the pain of missing out on it, you end up wasting your chance to get what you want," Fujishima's friend scolds him. "Eventually, you get to the point where that pain becomes normal, and you're stuck in a loop of losing whatever's important to you." Growing up, Fujishima realizes, is not making peace with lack, but going all out to get the things you think are important.

Harue learns this too when, embarrassed of his messy, musty overtime self, he dodges a dinner invitation with Fujishima and catches up instead with an old crush, now happily married with kids. Once, Harue would have been fine settling for a quiet, nonconfrontational acceptance, the friend who was understanding enough not to ask questions. But what he really wants—what he needs—is someone who will enthusiastically, proactively love him, enough to overcome the anxious attachment Harue has developed through his years of inexperience. That person is, of course, Fujishima, who reassures him that "when you are 100% yourself, that alone is genuinely perfect for me."

"Lovers on the Last Train" is light on character development and plot and dramatics, but Dayoo has a careful, lyrical touch with their writing. Of particular note is an early monologue from Harue where he compares his lack of relationship experience to an empty drawer that he has always ignored and is now forced to acknowledge. Dayoo's strongest work is in the opening pages, which is actually a flash forward to a year later, when Harue and Fujishima are dating. Exhausted from a long day's work, and wrapped up in the arms of his loving boyfriend, Harue finds himself casting a spell: Please don't have second thoughts. Stay with me forever. The juxtaposition of the comfortable domesticity of their lives with Harue's quiet desperation towards Fujishima is so delicious that if there's one thing I could fault Dayoo for, it's that they skimped out on the "getting along" part of Harue and Fujishima's relationship in favor of the more conventional "getting together" story.

(Side note: does anyone else feel like "Lovers on the Last Train" feels like a spinoff, as if Fujishima were a character in another story that Dayoo forgot to publish? The pet cat, the ex-lover that Harue briefly glimpses who may or may not be the same lover that catches Fujishima stalking Harue on his soba date with Ida, the former client who divorced his wife to be with Fujishima— these all feel like details referencing events that Dayoo assumes we're familiar with and threw me for a loop when they were all dropped without follow-up.)

I originally had a four-parter planned for #33, but it was unfortunately mostly me panning some series I'd read and found lacking. But in the in-between weeks, I realized that wasn't the energy with which I wanted to start 2026. I had purchased "Lovers on the Last Train" on a whim while in New York, browsing the Kinokuniya shelves and thinking—berating myself—about not-writing. I carted that volume to the new year party. It sat in my bag when the host opened the blind box to reveal The Butterfly Dream. That felt portentous. Do you know what The Butterfly Dream is supposed to symbolize? Fantasy, mysticism, but above all, transformation. It is a reference to Zhuangzi, who once dreamed he was a butterfly, and woke up unsure if he were a man who dreamed he were a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreamed it was a man. "Lovers on the Last Train" is unrealistic, but, well, isn't love often unrealistic? What makes something "unrealistic" anyway? In dreaming   that such love can be possible, that it can be possible for Harue and Fujishima, that it can be possible for me and you, do I not transform reality? If life is just a dream, then I can dream into life the unreality of dreams. Isn't that what bl is? A little dream of love, of transformation, for ourselves as well as the characters.

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You have read this kind of story before. An older, wealthier man finds a young, poorer man on the street. The younger man is jobless, hapless, arrestingly beautiful. The older man is bored, amused, arrestingly handsome. Together they determine the terms of their relationship, which oscillates wildly between father-son, guardian-ward, patron-patronage, and lovers. You feel strongly here the bl mantra that the gayest thing one man can be for another man is family. 

Kim Jiho is a product of his bad circumstances: a college drop-out, a former pickpocket, saddled with a father who drinks, gambles, and was violent towards Jiho. When Yeon Woojung picks him up off the street, Jiho (and the reader) assumes that it is nothing but the whim of a well-off stranger who wants to play Daddy Longlegs to an unfortunate youth, an assumption that is deepened when we learn that Woojung is a prosecutor. Woojung is impeccable, if inscrutable, in his role, buying Jiho a bed and a new wardrobe, telling Jiho he has no expectations that Jiho work, go to school, or even do chores at the house. Eventually, however, Jiho realizes that he and Woojung are more similar than they are different, and that far from wandering into an extended petplay roleplay, Woojung is hoping to heal himself through caring for Jiho. 

One of my favorite fictional characters is Baek Eunyung from Wanan's "No Home," who like Jiho is saddled with a violent drunkard of a father, bad family circumstances, and a personality that is the imp of the perverse made flesh. Throughout "No Home," Eunyung pushes everyone and everything around him to the breaking point, doing his best to destroy the fragile edifices of family (found and otherwise) and friendship that the other characters are trying to erect around him. This is because the Eunyung we meet initially in "No Home" wants to prove that the world is bad. If the world is bad, he reasons, then all the bad things that happen to him are not a function of him being bad or unlucky or pathetic, but rather because bad things happen to everyone. If he ruins a good thing, it is because good things do not exist. In ruining every good thing that comes his way, of course, he has created a self-perpetuating cycle that proves his point: the world is bad to Eunyung, because he has made it that way.

Jiho is not quite the same as Eunyung. Woojung canonically compares him to a cat who attacks its loving owner for no reason, but I don't think that's right either. Cats attack because they are overstimulated, because despite how much they love us, they can only tolerate so much. Jiho's imp of the perverse is a relative of self-harm, an attempt to punish himself. Jiho believes his violent, dark thoughts are unique to him, instead of something anyone in his situation would come up with; he believes that his reactions are a consequence of his inherited or innate bad personality, instead of the natural reactions of a child beaten and pushed into a corner. So instead of dismissing them, he forces himself to voice them out loud, expecting each time to be hurt for his bad thoughts, because hurt is what he deserves. 

What, then, is Woojung's problem? 

There is a core to Woojung that must be broken somehow. No normal person picks up a teenager, however beautiful, off the street and invites them into their home, to live without responsibility or obligation or even protection against theft. It's almost more normal that Woojung then allows said teenager to fuck him within an inch of his life, multiple times—at least then there's a reason for Jiho being there! Woojung doesn't date, keeps his friends at a remove, is friendly but not personal with his coworkers, doesn't want to get married, works a little too hard in a job in the justice system that he takes seriously but doesn't seem to love. These all speak to who he is somewhere outside of Jiho's worldview. But Woojung's interiority—and Jiho's narrative voice—is so strong that the reader too is warded off. All we have are implications and our own readings of them. 

The closest we ever get is the chapter that shows Woojung's point of view when he first picks up Jiho. But this, of all the Woojung actions, is the least interesting to me. This action needs no explanation, because it is the necessary catalyst for the story to exist. What I want is a peek into the cracked core that keeps Woojung there, that tried to turn away from Jiho's attraction only to, almost immediately, take the boy into his bed, that jeopardizes his neutrality as an arm of the law so as keep Jiho out of the criminal system, that expresses his anger at Jiho leaving him by asking snidely upon his return, "Did you enjoy your little trip?" If only we had access to what lies behind the measured adult Woojung forces himself to be afterwards, the one who has learned to be suspicious of immediate reactions, and his own most of all.

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What I love about the first season and a half of "Stranger" is the specificity to the characters. But as the story goes on, that specificity is clouded somehow. Love erases the individuality of Jiho and Woojung as people and reduces them simply to lovers molded in each other's shape. Their sentiments are those eternal sentiments of all lovers: I wish I had been there for you when you were a child, I will never let go of you, I love you no matter who you were or who you turn out to be. 

I'm tortured by this, because I want true love for Woojung and Jiho, but I also want the thorns and armor and (on Woojung's part) eel-like ability to slip out of expressing his actual feelings that were the reasons they needed love in the first place. Taken to the most extreme, "Stranger" seems to argue that just as all happy families are alike, all lovers are alike—and boring in that sameness. Late-stage Jiho is just a sulky black cat who lashes out when teased too much or given too much love. He is domesticated, full of smiles and tender demonstrations of affection (though just for Woojung), instead of the interestingly tangled snarl of contradictory emotions that he began as. 

"I wanted to look normal in front of Woojung," early Jiho says. He longs to be loved like a normal boy. By the end of the series, Jiho has achieved normalcy, so much so that he is anonymized, has become any number of fiercely loyal younger tops. But it was his pain, his abnormality, that drew him to Woojung initially, because it echoed Woojung's own. Later as he falls more and more in love with Woojung, those abnormalities no longer matter. Jiho insists that he doesn't care about Woojung's past. He will always accept Woojung, as he is, because who Woojung is at the moment is a man who loves Jiho. 

This is a beautiful love story, but not a particularly interesting character story. Woojung becomes a man defined only by his love and not the specificities that speak to the life he has lived up until that moment: his habit of throwing cups when angry, cheekily putting beer in Jiho's hoodie, picking at his food like a bird or the world's worst mukbang streamer, the way he strips down and dives into bed when sick. In the first stages of their relationship, Woojung has to remind Jiho to resist the totalizing gravity of love, which always tries to subsume the beloved into the lover's cannibalistic heart. First love makes Jiho unwilling to share Woojung with even Woojung's own memories. "You can't have my every first moment," Woojung chides Jiho. What Jiho falls for is a person who has lived a life without Jiho, and has chosen to live his life with Jiho going forward. It is a treasure Jiho has to learn to savor, and one that unfortunately bends to the demands of the requisite love story by Season 3. 

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I feel like I have been complaining too much, or at least picking too much at the threads that "Stranger" leaves behind. So as a finale let me highlight what "Stranger" does best. 

When trying to explain why he is helping Jiho, Woojung says, "I am just stepping on the brake pedal once in a while." This ethos of taking space, giving breathing room, distrusting one's immediate reactions, pervades the series, both narratively and in the characters' actions. Where other stories might lean in, "Stranger" always seems to be taking a step back. Too often, longer Korean bl manhwa become a series of characters reacting to plot points.  But "Stranger" is a story that tries not to rush, that realizes its strength is in the depiction of Jiho and Woojung feeling each other out. 

Sometimes this makes "Stranger" feel slow, even plodding, like chewing the gum of Woojung and Jiho's dynamic until there is no more flavor left. But at its strongest moments, "Stranger" exercises the kind of steely self-control you expect from its title character Woojung. In the beginning of Season 2, Jiho seethes at Woojung, "What do you know about my life, when you live in this comfortable house?" As it turns out, Woojung knows a lot. He has been exactly where Jiho is, and doesn't deserve this kind of treatment from Jiho. 

But instead of being angry, Woojung lowers the temperature. "That's a bit too harsh," he says. He doesn't try to explain himself. He doesn't yank out his album of photos showing that he too grew up in foster care, that he has been in Jiho's position, that he doesn't need a lecture on how precarious safety can feel when you have nothing. He gives Jiho the space to calm down, regret his rash actions, even feel ashamed of lashing out. That makes Jiho's eventual apology all the more sincere. It isn't that he was wrong because Woojung was once, too, a figure of pity; he was wrong because of his own feelings, his own actions.

The ultimate theme of "Stranger" circles around personal responsibility. What can, and should, we take responsibility for? In the end, the only thing we can, and should, answer for are our own feelings and the actions we ourselves take in response to those feelings. Over and over again, Jiho asks: what if I rob you? What if I kill you? What if I betray you? What if I love or leave you? Over and over again, Woojung answers: then you will have done what you have done. He cannot control Jiho. He can only judge Jiho for what Jiho chooses to do. 

Love can be a feeling held simply in one person's heart, but in that form it is incomplete. True love, as "Stranger" argues, is putting that feeling into action. In the final climax of the series, Jiho betrays Woojung, not by being violent, or stealing, or showing his weaknesses, or being caught in any other crime, but by abdicating on the only choice Woojung has asked of Jiho, to stay here with him. Woojung of all people knows what Jiho has lacked in his life up until this point, and he has tried his best to give Jiho all of it: reassurance, the space to make mistakes, firm but kind guidance and correction, the tools to navigate the traps and labyrinths your anxious brain can create without you. Isn't that enough? What more can Woojung give him? All he has asked in return is what Jiho is capable of giving, and that is Jiho himself. 

Instead, Jiho runs away. And in reaction, for the first time in their relationship, Woojung shows a white-hot anger, and one directed towards Jiho specifically. "I had dreams about killing you. I even imagined it once," Jiho admits when he is faced with Woojung again. "Great," Woojung says, with a surprising immediacy. "I wanted to do the same to you."

I love this ending sequence, which I will not spoil in detail so that you too can enjoy it. There are many ways this last arc of their relationship could go, and instead of a tortuous separation arc or some confluence of plot points, Sunmyeong and Chub wisely choose instead to focus on Jiho learning to take responsibility for himself and his feelings and showing us, finally, a crack in Woojung's armor, a peek into what hurts him the most. After a whole series being accommodating and generous and the bigger person, so to speak, in bed, Woojung even demonstrates a brief moment of venom when goading Jiho into fucking him, showing us there are more ways to be mean during sex than just humiliation or physical pain. If I wished for him to go further, if I wished for Woojung to finally lash out and show us the delinquent that Seok Joongwon tamed into submission to make the adult Woojung is now, that's probably my personal kinks coming out. (I also think Woojung should have topped once! Just once!) It's enough to recognize that Woojung too can be emotionally compromised, and that of course it is Jiho who does it in the end. It is these weaknesses that make them the distinct characters they are and define the distinct love they are finally able to share in the end.

"Ichigenme" is one of Yoshinaga's earliest professional works, but in it you can already see the bones of what will come: the complicated complicity of women and the men they love that appears in "Ooku," the archetype of the competent man who hides his trauma behind a frivolous exterior that will later haunt "Antique Bakery," and the finely detailed food spreads and depictions of domesticity as an expression of love that star in "What Did You Eat Yesterday." Tamiya and Tohdou are not Yoshinaga's strongest character work; they are constantly shown up in both volumes of "Ichigenme" by the supporting roles: their classmates who show no compunction using Tamiya's bookishness for their own gain, a professor who attracts Tamiya's respect and then attention, later Tohdou's own brother who weasels his way into the bed of Tamiya's colleague. My personal favorite is Terada, a female classmate and Tamiya's only other friend, who is ostracized by the entire student population when a nude picture of a woman who looks suspiciously like her appears in a magazine. Terada, like many other Yoshinaga characters, is steely, shameless, all-in on her own survival, and she is undoubtedly the heroine of her own story. Tohdou—and to a lesser extent, Tamiya—are involved, but it is as if they along with the readers are reacting to the merciless rhythm of Yoshinaga's plot, a world over which they have no control. This is another common Yoshinaga trait. Her main characters often suffer this fate.

But this is the joy of reading a Yoshinaga Fumi bl. What she offers in her stories is not a series of dots that connect into a line, but a scatterplot of interactions that each time miraculously shows her reader something about the experience of living in the world. She excels at the tension between two objects, be they faces or characters or concepts or even body parts. The most classic of the Yoshinaga Fumi scenes is of one person shouting down another in righteous anger, while the expressions change on the other's face. The tension is always in the shot/reverse-shot. She has never been proficient with the full human form, least of all when it comes to bodies naked and writhing in a sex scene. When Tamiya and Tohdou have sex, as they eventually do, their bodies engage in congress without us or even the rest of them. We see a hand or a tongue on a body part, and then, separated by panels and pages, a close-up of their faces reacting in pleasure. 

The two-volume bl manga is an exercise in excess and restraint. You need a story strong enough to stand on its own, but expansive enough to fill more than a few chapters. You need the vision to build out a world, but the discipline to not get distracted by too many sideplots. Yoshinaga's answer to this has always been the anthology approach, with a strong opening to ground the setting and dynamics before playing couples (both romantic and otherwise) off of each other (both directly and indirectly). The most perfect example of this is the second volume she gave to her debut work "The Moon and the Sandals," which eschews any kind of connective narrative tissue in favor of a series of interludes into her characters' lives. The most moving for me is a very short chapter she dedicates to a female side character who was rejected by Kobayashi, the main character, in volume one. Upon learning that Kobayashi is now dating her brother, she tries to put on a brave face, but then collapses into tears, and it's her monologue fervently wishing for time to heal all wounds and give everyone "our place to belong" that closes out volume one. "Naru-chan Thereafter" is her exit from volume two. Framed as if the reader has managed to grab her off the street for a quick interview, it consists only of panels of her face as she reassures us that she is happy. This is the luxury the two-volume series affords us: a space for all characters to find their happiness and a space for Yoshinaga to flex her creative prowess.

When Yoshinaga is at her peak, her tendency to skip along the surface of time in her characters' lives feels poignant and well-observed. When Yoshinaga falters, her almost pathological avoidance of linear storytelling is frustrating. So it is with the second volume of "Ichigenme," which comes off like a superfluous collection of original doujinshi, with its many sex scenes and the sudden pivot to Tohdou's brother Hiroaki. Where I think Yoshinaga lets the story down is Tamiya and Tohdou's dynamic. At the end of volume one, they are more than friends but hardly lovers, but volume two opens with a smash cut to them gainfully employed and happily cohabiting, with nary a thought for the seven years of in-between. The Tamiya and Tohdou here are only superficially similar to the characters we meet in volume one, and much more similar to extras we might have met in "Antique Bakery," which Yoshinaga had either finished or was writing simultaneously at the time of "Ichigenme" volume two. Freed from the structure of the zemi, Tamiya and Tohdou's interactions feel aimless, even at their liveliest, in a way that's not true of Kobayashi and his eventual lover Toyo from volume two of "The Moon and the Sandals." 

But it's still a joy to sit with them, to see where their lives have taken them. The final story, about Tohdou's brother Hiroaki, is Yoshinaga at her most heart-strings-pulling, most quietly devastating. It doesn't fit with anything else thematically in "Ichigenme," but still, you cannot be upset watching a master practice her craft. Perhaps Yoshinaga is the rare type that either excels at the oneshot or the five-plus volume saga. If I mourn "Ichigenme's" short run time, it is because after this, Yoshinaga will write the long series that cement her as one of the all-time greats. One cannot help but wonder what she could have done with a true bl epic.

Yamada Yugi has not fared as well as Yoshinaga Fumi in recent times when it comes to English licenses, but once upon a time someone—or many someones—employed by the constellation of now-defunct publishers must have loved her as much as I still do, because a surfeit of her early work was licensed ("Spring Fever," "Glass Sky," "Laugh Under the Sun," "Picnic"). I've already written about "Close the Last Door," and I meant to save the rest of this post for another week so that I would have a backlog and could get off the weekly treadmill, but I love Yamada Yugi (and you, my reader!) too much to hold back.

Yamada's works may have never gotten the acclaim of "Antique Bakery," but very few bl manga have ever surpassed "Don't Blame Me" in its use of the two-volume format. "Don't Blame Me" is Yamada Yugi's transition from oneshots to a longer running series, though even in her current career, she remains a one-volume queen. Perhaps that's why the first chapter of "Don't Blame Me" feels so unconventional, too self-contained and unromantic for a bl, more like a pilot to a slice-of-life josei that was never written. It opens not on either half of the main couple, but on thirteen-year-old Makoto, who pays a surprise visit to his cousin Kaji Toshiaki after seeing his name in the credits of a mediocre romance film. Upset by Kaji's denouncing of his dreams to one day direct a movie, Makoto is determined to find out what happened to the passionate Cousin Toshi of his memories, only to get himself entangled in the whirlwind of Kaji's friends, all former members of their college film club, who take it upon themselves to acquaint Makoto with the endless complications of adult life—including Kaji's boyfriend Nakamura.

One reason why I wanted to add "Don't Blame Me" to this week's discussion of "Ichigenme" is that they are both two-volume series with very similar premises that turn out to be drastically different and, in those differences, reveal their creators' styles. Though they both star college students and main characters who are surprised by a guy-on-guy French kiss as an initiation ritual (both even feature a character who turns away from the study of law against his father's wishes!), from there Yoshinaga and Yamada's approaches to storytelling heavily diverge. While things technically happen in "Ichigenme," they often do so in the background; Yoshinaga's interest is mostly in the changing internal lives of her characters, which she either depicts through her signature microexpressions or in internal monologue. On the other hand, characters in early Yamada Yugi rarely change; instead her stories meet her characters where they are and hold space for —or rather, are wholly in service to—their antics. When Yamada Yugi is at her best, it feels like being caught up in someone else's tempo, tumbling faster and faster down the hill with her characters and dreading when you will eventually smack head-first into the end. 

I know I have leaned too heavily on cinema as a comparison as of late. I cannot promise I will stop. "Don't Blame Me" is a story about loving movies, after all. What Yamada Yugi understands is that manga is a visual medium, perhaps the only one that can match movies for visual tricks. "Don't Blame Me" is full of scene transitions that, like dissolve cuts, only work because of the medium. In volume one, a character is forced to interrupt a dramatic scene between Makoto and Kaji by yelling "cut", which suddenly transforms the panels that came before into a scene. In volume two, the climax of the college backstory arc breaks into present day and the return of Makoto by way of a VHS being played. I would never go so far as to say Yamada Yugi is formally inventive, but she has such an intuitive understanding of how to move a story from scene to scene. Though nothing about the paneling or the style tries to convey cinematic language, reading "Don't Blame Me" feels like watching a quirky dramedy, more so than other manga that actually attempt to look like a movie. 

The two-volume bl manga is an exercise in excess and restraint, and reading back this series in 2025, what I marvel at the most about "Don't Blame Me" is its ruthless economy. The amount of things Yamada Yugi manages to shove into the nine short chapters of "Don't Blame Me" would make a modern uke taking in a bl manhwa horse dick blush. The opening and closing chapters being told through the point of view a thirteen-year-old cousin aside, there's also unrequited love between two half-brothers, a returning alum struggling with depression, someone's mother in the hospital,detailed notes on John Carpenter's films, a pregnancy, a whole student movie being filmed, and of course, Kaji and Nakamura's love story. In 2025, you'd be tempted to think I was describing a three-season Korean webtoon.

How does Yamada Yugi manage it? I think it is because she is a master at pacing and momentum. A good story must know where it is going and how to get there and above all it must make you feel like it is bringing you along. When for instance Nakamura begins to get jealous of what he perceives to be Kaji's feelings for fellow club member Kujirai, Yamada Yugi does not let Nakamura's feelings dominate the story. There is no easily severable "jealousy arc." Instead, the jealousy sits like a quiet passenger in volume one alongside the other pieces of the story: Kujirai's troubled relationships with the various men in his life, which Kaji tries unsuccessfully to detangle, Kaji's burgeoning interest in cinematography and film-making, Nakamura own friendship with Kujirai who is less "other man" and more "chaotic relationship counselor." By the time volume two turns its eyes squarely on Kaji and Nakamura, the jealousy doesn't feel like a plot point added just to progress the relationship. It is natural. It has been there the whole time.

This too is the luxury the two-volume bl manga can offer us. Time enough for everything, and time enough for love, too.

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Last week I talked about the two types of desire in bl manga, the cannibal and the artist. But there is, as always, a secret third thing: he who doth protest desire too much. 

It would be a cliche to say that bl is often about repression, men refusing to confront the shape of their true desire. But in the best of these stories, that repression is not just of desire for another man, but of desire, period: denial that one could be capable of wanting another person at all, rejection of the body as a locus of desire, horror that one can be rendered so foolish by unruly passion, which accomplishes no purpose except for itself. In "Ichigenme," Tamiya is repulsed by his own lust. When he is forced to confront his disappointment that a kiss from a male professor was not any kind of advance but rather just the bad habit of a drunkard, he tries to use Tohdou's obvious attraction for him as a weapon with which to hurt himself, as if to turn himself permanently off desire once and for all. When Tamiya comes out, it is with very specific words in mind: that he is "unable to have sex with a woman," not that he is gay. Sex of any kind, especially penetrative sex, embarrasses him even seven years later. It is not that he is embarrassed of finding men attractive (he unabashedly tells Tohdou to his face that he finds his brother Hiroaki handsome), but he is embarrassed, still, by his very embodied desire for Tohdou specifically. There are maybe issues here for Tamiya to unpack, but alas, the title of the series is not "The First Class is Sex Therapy."

In "Don't Blame Me," the three point of view characters—Makoto, Kaji, and Nakamura—think of themselves as observers to the passions of others and are shocked when they are forced to confront it in themselves and, in the case of Makoto, in their loved ones. Nakamura is so horrified by his greed for Kaji's body that he overacts and tries to reject Kaji's friendship too. Why, he bemoans, can he not be satisfied by simply spending time with Kaji, watching John Carpenter marathons with Kaji, seeing the love of movies bloom in Kaji? Why must he also want Kaji carnally? Like Tamiya, Nakamura can only conceive of desire as some horrible force that will bulldoze everything on the path to consummation, a sign that there is something wrong with himself. It is hard enough for him to bear the weight of his own desire; the idea that it might be requited, that he might have to bear Kaji's desire as well, is unthinkable. 

As for Kaji, Yamada Yugi performs a clever sleight of hand with Kujirai, who is positioned in "Don't Blame Me" as an object of fascination, inspiration, ridicule, and ultimately desire. It's Kujirai that makes Kaji want to pick up a camera; it's Kujirai whose expressions Kaji wants to observe; it's Kujirai whom Kaji thinks he can sleep with. But Kujirai points out rightly this is because Kaji is chronically avoidant, more comfortable trying to solve other people's problems and filming other people's desires than confronting his own problems. "You're not in love with me," he points out. "You're just trying to take the easy way out." In any case, for all his hypersexuality, Kujirai doesn't actually have sex with any of the main characters of "Don't Blame Me," as implausible as that sounds. He may be crazy, but he does so with a deep sense of responsibility for his friends and cordons himself off appropriately.

This too is the luxury of the two-volume bl, which gives us time enough for everything, even different kinds of desire. Kaji wants to be moved, but only at a remove, from behind the viewfinder and never in front of it. Time and time again, he films Kujirai's most vulnerable moments, and Kujirai never flinches, yet when Miki turns the camera back on Kaji (and Nakamura with him), Kaji balks. If he is to mature at all, he must learn that "I want to film him" is not the same as "I want to fuck him." If desire were only the compulsion to admire from afar, to capture beauty and wrestle it into a frame, then everything would be simple. It would be rational, as Makoto pointed out, if Kaji's love interest were Kujirai. But "the scariness of Carpenter's films," Nakamura points out, "comes from not having explanations." Desire, too, is irrational. In the end, all this theorizing is for naught. "You make me feel stupid thinking about things too deeply," Kujirai informs Kaji, throwing a drunken Nakamura into his arms. 

We want what we want, and who we want, no matter how irrational or embarrassing.

You know what else is embarrassing? Having to once again explain that 801 (the publisher of "Ichigenme") and June ("Don't Blame Me") are both DMP imprints and thus zombies with uncertain fates, shambling along with their half-dead list of publications. If you want your own copy of either series, you're best off trying to find them secondhand, or sometimes on Amazon. As for me, not to brag, but you'll never buy these babies off of me.

To act on desire is always an exercise in mediation, because the true nature of desire is impossible. The object of desire is always at a remove, and we desire to bring it closer. Impossible! Closer can be literal—into our own body as meat, but the meat/body of the one we love can never represent the wholeness of them. Closer can be figurative—creating something separate from both our bodies, a thing that, unbodied, represents the one we love. But a representation is just that, and will always remain just that: a substitute. Both cannibalism and portraiture are imperfect, but it is through the friction of that imperfection that we create bl, over and over again.

Well, maybe all this is just a facile restatement of Byungchul Han's argument in "The Agony of Eros." Alas, I am too stupid to understand Han but too smart to hope I could get away with pretending I did. When he wrote that "the negativity of otherness—that is, the atopia of the Other, which eludes all ability—is constitutive of erotic experience," I think he already had this thesis in mind, that desire always struggles with a drive to pervert the object of our desire into something we can understand or have or possess. True love is, perhaps, only achieved when one willingly surrenders to that eternal unknowing, unhaving, unpossessing. 

Until then, let's talk about Tojitsuki Hajime's oneshot, "Even Just the Tip."

Art student Tokuji is struggling with his recent lack of inspiration, when he suddenly encounters a tattooed ramen shop cook named Ryuuzou taking out the trash. One glimpse of the dragon tattoo on the stranger's thigh and neck is enough to activate Tokuji's imagination—and also his libido. Desperate to better observe the man in order to sculpt him, Tokuji begins a tentative friendship with Ryuuzou, one that is complicated by Tokuji's near-constant wet dreams which star none other than a fully naked and fully tattooed Ryuuzou letting Tokuji have his way. 

"Even Just the Tip" is a simple story, told with humor and Tojitsuki's robust artistic sense, and certainly very enjoyable, but hardly one with endless depths to plumb. What draws me to it, then, is Tojitsuki's perfect straddling of the boundary between "cannibalism" and "portraiture." Tokuji is a sculptor, and his final product is a lifesize clay model of Ryuuzou, complete with imagined tattoos painted on. There can be no purer expression of "exorcising the feeling into the creation of an Other" than making a 1:1 scale clay model, yet doesn't something about it feel cannibalistic? Perhaps it's no coincidence that, of all the professions Tojitsuki could make Ryuuzou, she made him a cook, one who directly feeds Tokuji's body and is thinking of opening his own shop. In his fantasies, Tokuji is rabid, feral, all teeth. He'd eat Ryuuzou if he was on offer, I'm sure.

In this, "Even Just the Tip" differs from its other portraiture siblings, like, say, Arai Niboshiko's "Give Me A Nickname," whose artist character Amou only has sex with his muse Jose because "this is where I'm closest to Jose." In the first chapter, Amou runs his hands all over a sleeping Jose, and when Jose wakes up, horny and roaring to go, Amou escapes into his room to draw, leaving Jose to masturbate outside his door. Tokuji wants sex with Ryuuzou, or at least the fantasy of it, and even fantasizes about the sex not meeting expectations, literally getting off on being sexually inadequate for Ryuuzou. Meanwhile Amou follows a more conventional portraiture storyline, with Jose begging Amou to see him as a man and not a god, an Other that is the fount of Art. "I can't show you the you I see with my twisted eyes," Amou tells Jose, and Jose, hurt, delivers the finishing blow: "What you want to protect is not me, but your feelings for Jose." Amou's portraiture of Jose has done too good of a job exorcising the desire. It now lives on as its own zombie of Jose in Amou's mind.

Of course, Arai—and Noda Ayako—is a mangaka who skews towards the portraiture side in all her work. Tojitsuki, on the other hand, later wrote "Double Suicide," a one-volume bl story that is both metaphorically and quite literally about attempted cannibalism expressed through blood-drinking. (I might as well call this theory the Tojitsuki Hajime continuum!) Sometimes art is devouring, and that makes it cannibalistic. Even here, the horseshoe theory has credibility. 

For all his attempts to recreate Ryuuzou as art, Tokuji never gets close to the real Ryuuzou. He never actually gets to see Ryuuzou's naked form or even the entirety of Ryuuzou's tattoo. Though Ryuuzou offers, we only get gestures to where it is on his body: the neck, the thighs, all down his back and along his butt. Tokuji never confesses, and even at the end, Ryuuzou treats Tokuji mostly like what he is: a friendly regular at his ramen shop. I love this elusiveness, the distance we and Tokuji feel from the Ryuuzou, who for all Tokuji's vivid fantasies is never elevated to idol/god status. Ryuuzou remains wholly another person, and one that Tokuji cannot "know." 

Where things fall apart is when the revenge plot starts explaining things. (So few stories survive the explanation stage!) When Eunsung is revealed, his presence is so anodyne as to be forgettable. Of course Hyukjoon as his father must love him, but his frail good-boy personality cannot bear the emotional weight of the story. So instead, we turn to Minjae. All the moves of the pitiable uke narrative are pulled out for Minjae's benefit: he is an orphan, he is sexually and emotionally abused by the orphanage director, he was bullied by the other kids in the orphanage, he is derided in school for his family situation, he is then carefully groomed by his adoptive father only to be gutted emotionally, hung like a sacrificial lamb by his manipulated feelings. 

You sense Akkang struggling with how far to push our sympathies for Minjae: is he a victim to Hyukjoon's machinations, or does he deserve it, first for his hand in Eunsung's death and then for his willingness to throw any and everything into the pyre of his love for Hyukjoon? The story gives Minjae multiple outs in the form of Lee Taehyun's meddling, resulting in an endless parade of sex scenes between Minjae and Taehyun, oftentimes at the school where they are student-teaching (!) during the schoolday (!!) while students are just a door away (!!!). You know I am not a prude and love a risky public sex moment but these had the air of Akkang and Sam filling a sex scene quota just to check it off the box. There is also a confusing sideplot involving a student named Han Sunho, who turns out to be yet another kid from Minjae's orphanage who knows the whole Eunsung backstory and tries to warn Minjae, only to be rebuffed. When all these toothless diversions finally clear, we still land right back where we started, with Minjae in his father's bed, in his father's arms, unwilling to escape and forgo the only love he knows. 

The unfortunate reality is that "The Perfect Relationship" is at its best when it is zigzagging along the line of pseudo-incest. In my post on the "Son of the Mimura Family" series, I posit that brothers in fiction are inherently homoerotic; well, the only thing that trumps fictional brothers is the adoptive father, or the older man who functions as a father, which is why characters in BL are so often raised by their older brothers. BL stories are one of the few realms of fiction where authors comfortably explore the conflation of familial love and romantic love, and BL authors understand that the adoptive male relative is the most inherently homoerotic example of it. Why are you, a man, trying to become another man's family? What are you, gay or something? When it's a blood relation, at least you have no choice, which makes Minjae's declaration that he had no choice but to fall in love with Hyukjoon even more appropriate and even more transgressive. When Minjae says, "I love you, dad" he means it both ways. The ultimate love is not having to choose. That doesn't make it healthy, safe, or sane. But it does make him very, very genuine. 

By the end, "The Perfect Relationship" proposes that the perfect revenge is the ultimate exercise in empathy; thus, if you believe that a relationship is about understanding one another, seeing one another, then there is no relationship more perfect than the avenger who has his victim perfectly in the palm of his hand. As father and adoptive son, as avenger and victim, Hyukjoon and Minjae have already reached the highest highs a relationship can go; sex is almost less intimate than anything else they share. Because they know each other as only father/son and avenger/victim can, they complete each other, 'til death do they part. Minjae shoved Eunsung into the fire that eventually killed him because he wanted Eunsung to feel what he felt, bereft of any love or comfort in the world, abused by everyone around him. It's fitting, then, that Minjae's fate is to experience a similar revenge from Eunsung's father, who intuits that what would hurt Minjae the most is not violence and abuse, but tenderness given and then yanked away forever. And, in a way, if Minjae could not stay with Hyukjoon forever (which you know he cannot), perhaps this is the next best option. As his purported murderer, he is also, in a way, Hyukjoon's forever widow. He can spend the rest of his life mourning the man he loved. 

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The most frustrating stories for me are the ones where the creator appears not to trust their characters to pull off the story and saddles them with some extraneous element, some explicability, that makes the story's themes neon-blatant. So it is, in my opinion, with Shinou Ryo's "Cry of Despair," which opens on Utsumi Eito joining Akamine Eito's division as an assistant section chief. Though Akamine doesn't remember Utsumi at all, they in fact started at the company at around the same time, and Akamine even saved Utsumi from some aruhara (alcohol harassment) at their joint welcome party. Utsumi, however, is not here out of gratitude. He is here to bring Akamine down. Because at the same joint welcome party six years ago, a very drunk Akamine brutally raped Utsumi and then went on to act as if he didn't even know Utsumi existed. 

As with the attempts to use misery and tragedy to give Minjae's character depth in "The Perfect Relationship," I struggle with Shinou's use of rape as the origin of this revenge plot, not because I'm uncomfortable with using sexual assault as a plot point, but because Akamine's rape of Utsumi doesn't connect with anything else in the story. It is a rape so horrifyingly explicit and thus impossible to mistake for anything but a callous act of sexual violence—but none of Akamine's later actions seem to indicate he is capable of such a thing, not even while blackout drunk. Yes, of course, this is a cliche, the perpetrator that everyone claims could never do such a thing. We hear it all the time in reality. But fiction is different from reality; things don't need to cohere in reality, and we can never profess to know the whole truth about a real person. In fiction, everything (brothers, adoptive fathers, drunken sexual assaults) is intentional, and everything we need to know about a fictional character should appear on the page. Without the tissue of narrative cohesion, this feels like Shinou taking a sledgehammer to the equation. You can't walk back from Akamine's actions. This is the easiest, most blatant way for us to believe he deserves what Utsumi does to him going forward.

Well, maybe you disagree. Maybe for you, the senselessness is the point. And if that's the case, I also agree with you! Where "Cry of Despair" succeeds is in the realm of senselessness—that is, in the surrender of the plot to Shinou's heartbreakingly beautiful art, which is full of weeping faces and flower imagery and dramatic poses and hands reaching for each other and grasping at bodies they cannot have, extreme low-angle and high-angle shots, sometimes dutch-angle shots, the occasional object out of "focus" as it "floats" in between the "lens" and the object in the "foreground." "Cry of Despair" doesn't look like a movie, and because it is a manga, it doesn't actually have a camera, but its panels often mimic cinematic language. When it works, it is because Shinou's visual language—and thus the characters—has such a strong presence that you are drawn in. 

There is a sequence from "Cry of Despair" that I cannot forget. In chapter 6, we learn that Akamine was in love with his former senpai Saeki, who was ousted from the company three years ago after being accused of making a major mistake on a project. Since then, Akamine has been struggling to keep this department afloat, so that if Saeki ever could return to the company, they could go back to the way things were. But when Akamine calls up Saeki, proposing that they live together again, as they did in the company dorms, Saeki rejects him on no uncertain terms. "I always knew you were in love with me," he says. "But my feelings aren't the same as the ones you have for me."

Shinou illustrates this moment with an endless series of desks, each decorated with a single flower sprig in a glass vase. As Saeki talks over the phone, Akamine imagines him taking one of the flowers out of the vase and pressing it into Akamine's hand before turning away. Akamine then imagines himself violating Saeki—or maybe simply having rough sex with Saeki—while weeping, "I love you! Please love me back!" The scene then fades into present day, and the flowers-on-a-desk imagery is never explained or even brought up again.

"Cry of Despair" is full of moments like this, dream-like sequences showing emotions heightened to such peaks that they seem to envelop all the characters in a domain expansion of fantasy that is neither real nor not-real. In a dual sequence at the end of chapter 9, Akamine remembers Utsumi holding him, crying, just as he is touched on the heart by a camellia petal. Utsumi at the same time remembers Akamine by his side, as he was after Utsumi's kidnapping, quietly praying for Utsumi's well-being. Desire takes on a form, one that Utsumi and Akamine can both interact with in their mind's eye, even if it doesn't have any physical shape. One even begins to wonder: was Utsumi's rape by Akamine even real in the sense of happening to their two physical bodies, or just real in the sense of happening in their minds, not unlike Akamine's dream of fucking Saeki in a mind palace full of flowers? In the world of "Cry of Despair," that difference would hardly matter. The imagined is real, or rather Utsumi and Akamine's combined capability for angst is able to transmute the imagined into reality. 

Perhaps that is why the climax of the "Cry of Despair" is a rather far-fetched and bloody knife fight that ends in Akamine and Utsumi both collapsed on the floor, their enemies having escaped almost as if embarrassed to be caught up in their romantic drama. You reach the end of "Cry of Despair" feeling like you've witnessed a satisfying journey from hatred and resentment to acceptance and the possibility of future happiness, but you'd be hard pressed to explain the exact steps of the journey or how, exactly, Akamine and Utsumi walked it. And well, maybe it's enough that Akamine and Utsumi—and presumably Shinou Ryo herself— know the answer. If the opposite of love is not hate but indifference, then revenge might as well be a courtship. It certainly is for these two.

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If you go into Yakguk's "A Declaration of Revenge" expecting romance, you may be disappointed; but if you go into it looking for the perfect crime thriller, you will be served more than you can possibly eat. One can, without much difficulty, imagine Park Shinwook's version of the opening chapter, which has enough film-like framing shots to serve as a storyboard: a man reflected in another character's sunglasses, the slash of a car revealing a figure waiting by a highway railing, carefully arranged scene-setting before cutting into a moment of explosive—but unseen—violence.

The eponymous revenge here is Lee Jungyool's. While in high school, he was kidnapped by Myung Wonchul, a big name in the world of organized crime, who saw his father Congressman Lee Seokhyun as an enemy. Beaten, tortured, finger cut off, he eventually learns that Myung Wonchun was able to capture him because his personal information was gathered and then leaked by a journalist named Han Gitae. Years later, Gitae is no longer a journalist but a private investigator, and an adult Jungyool has come to claim his pound of flesh: getting Gitae's assistance in finding, and then killing, Myung Wonchul once and for all. 

"A Declaration of Revenge" is almost too perfect in its conception and execution. It feels like the inverse of those Chinese live action adaptations of danmei novels, where the gay relationship at the center is defanged into something that you could squintingly call bromance. For a good stretch of "A Declaration of Revenge," Yakguk has carried the reader along purely on the strength of the plot: details on drug distribution channels, the mysterious death of Gitae's sunbae, an intensely cinematic sequence showing high school Jungyool suffering at the hands of Myung Wonchul, the foreboding sense that Jungyool is not quite what he seems. For a very long time, you can squint away the BL undertones of Gitae and Jungyool's relationship, until at the end of chapter 5, Gitae allows himself to be riled up and clumsily seduced by Jungyool while they are hiding away from the warehouse explosion, and the two characters do the deed, albeit offscreen. 

What seems like an acknowledgement, finally, that the two are working in the confines of a BL story becomes complicated by Jungyool's outrageous claim in chapter 7 that he did everything he did to keep Gitae from chasing after Myung Wonchul and dying just like his sunbae. Does that include the sex? What a concept, that Jungyool may have been pretending to want Gitae, in order to hide the fact that he wants Gitae, a misdirection that feels like—and is—a traumatized boy throwing a tantrum. 

Yakguk specializes in the cheerfully deranged, characters who are full of life and demand their place in it, who meet life head on and fighting, though not, perhaps, always in the most well-adjusted ways. She has imbued in Han Gitae something none of the other characters mentioned in this post thus far have: a grasp on his own sanity. He knows that trauma bonding does not a healthy relationship make, and he knows that he and Jungyool have both allowed this search for Myung Wonchul to destroy their lives, such that they remain stunted, paralyzed, unable to move on from that moment or each other. Jungyool's revenge was never really against Gitae. He and his father planned this plot against Myung Wonchul with singular, cold-blooded precision. But somewhere Jungyool lost his head, allowed sentiment to cloud his judgement. Every aspect of the search for Myung Wonchul became his whole life, including his own obsession with Han Gitae. Gitae can see it. Jungyool cannot.

Gitae is right to leave Jungyool, to give them both space to become what they could have become, had not Myung Wonchul brought them catastrophically together. That's why the ending of the main story of "A Declaration of Revenge" is so good, so poignant, so striking, and why I reject the livelier, but less challenging, epilogue ending. In the end of chapter 8, Jungyool tracks Gitae down to a train headed towards Seoul. Jungyool boards the train briefly to chat with Gitae and, after a dry exchange mostly centered on an expose Gitae intends to release detailing Jungyool and his father's involvement in "Myung Wonchul Gate," Jungyool gets off the train. Gitae watches him as he stands on the platform in the snow. And, presumably, this is how they once again part.

Whenever Gitae and Jungyool meet, they seem to ruin things for each other. If only there were a way they could coexist by each other's side, without anything horrible happening to themselves or innocent bystanders. But they cannot. They are two bodies set in motion by each other a long time ago, and they must inevitably collide, exploding everything around them. Unlike Utsumi and Akamine from "Cry of Despair," they are not imaginative people. Their inner lives are as straightforward as their vice-grips on their obsessions. They turn everything they imagine into reality through brute force. No fantasy realm for them. The only thing they can hope for is to do no further damage, to leave each other in peace. 

So look, Gitae. From this distance, through this glass, Jungyool can fit in the palm of your hand. Soon the two of you will hurtle into opposite directions, but not yet. In this current moment, and this moment only, he belongs to you wholly. In this moment, your shared and troubled past recedes, and your separate and troubled futures, purely hypothetical, have not yet come to bear. Anything you do here, and here alone, is safe. So you tap his face. You see him stare, as if straight through you. And then you bring your fingers to your lips, as if in a kiss.