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So here’s the thing about Strobe in the Dark: is it my favourite Hayakawa Nojico? No. Did Tokyopop release my dream perfect vision of Hayakawa’s first ever english print manga? No. Do I think the story is outstanding or particularly moving? No! Did I, regardless of all of those things, cry basically through the first chapter because I was so overwhelmed at the very idea that I was holding this first ever physical copy of a Hayakawa Nojico manga in english? YES!!!!!!

(my copy of Strobe that I cried on, lovingly photographed in front of flowers.)

I realise that saying all of that does not imply a very impassioned recommendation for the manga itself aside from the volume as a concept, which I would now like to correct. To me, the true pleasure in reading a Hayakawa Nojico manga does not necessarily lie within her storytelling ability, but rather in the feat of her comicking as a storytelling medium. You will likely open up a spread and be met with a barrage of connected dialogue bubbles laid over smatterings of jagged cut panels and white space that at first glace seem messy and difficult to follow, and then at further consideration as you connect with the page, you will find that the dialogue leads you around the page, and when it does not, the panels do, and when they do not, you will be lucky to be treated to what may be spiraling, knotted, or clamorous use of shape; a fistful of ribbons, an unspooling roll of film, the bold hand-drawn clack clack clack of deafening train tracks, which will lead your eyes into understanding precisely what Hayakawa has intended for you to understand. And so it is not simply the images and words which are used to depict the story, it is the form they take as well. It is the idiosyncratic craft of her comics which make them so relentlessly compelling to me.

(in order: Yozora no Sumikko de, Strobe in the Dark, Endou-kun no Jikken Note. oh my god dude )

I almost, almost wanted to end that sentence with “regardless of the content of the comics,” but that would be untrue, because I believe that one could not be without the other. In Strobe, main character Arata is in frantic, flushed anguish sixty (perhaps seventy!) percent of the time, overwhelmed by his best friend Shotaro’s fearless affection for him; his anxious thoughts jitter down pages in sharp boxes, frenzied staccato dialogue is mirrored in form as frenzied staccatos of speech bubbles, pools of film developer drip down a page as if thoughts melting away. It’s never that you’re reading the text of the story accompanied by visuals, but that the story is being depicted through all aspects of the medium.

(arata freaking out)

Strobe charms itself to me particularly in its central metaphor of film as anxiety. Arata’s anxiety over the risk of homophobia collides with his desire both to reciprocate Shotaro’s feelings and his own private knowledge that he wants to alter their relationship beyond recognition, and he, as the son of professional photographers and a photographer himself, relates this to the idea of light hitting undeveloped film and overexposing it to the point of destruction—when your own perverse desires which you keep tucked and hidden in the dark are exposed to light, you risk the light becoming irreversibly tainted by those desires. I own and use my father’s film camera from the 1980’s and because of this I really connect with and enjoy the use of film photography as metaphor in Strobe, so I hope you’ll forgive me for this but I’m going to continue the metaphor here: Arata eventually finds that when given the time and care to develop his relationship with Shotaro, not only does the bright, quick light that is Shotaro’s presence in Arata’s life not become tainted by Arata’s desire, Arata comes to understand that when that light hits the darkness of Arata’s secrets, they become a kind of lightness too.

If you’re a BL fan, Strobe in the Dark does not necessarily tread new territory, or say what it has to say in a particularly profound or awe-inspiring way. However, if you’re a comic fan, a fan of manga as a comic medium, a fan of comics as a storytelling medium, etc, I absolutely cannot recommend Hayakawa Nojico’s works enough, and because Strobe is the first of hers to get an official english release, I implore you with all of my heart to check it out. Request it for purchase at your local library, check it out at your local library, buy the print version, the digital, whatever whatever, it doesn’t matter, I need you to see it. In fact, you should read everything of hers that you can: Yozora no Sumikko de is my favourite for its delicate and emotionally wrenching back and forth between its two adult main characters, I recently reread it’s sequel Yoake ni Furu and it made me cry despite what might read as a little bit of tedium. Read her unfinished and seemingly discarded stories because they’re beautiful and intriguing (Hana no Saku Koro is the one I long for completion the most,) her oneshots are really great (Ame Arare, Kari Karare is a single delicious bite of something deeply compelling, Ameiro no Toge is one of my favourites,) read it all!

If ever there is another official english release of a Hayakawa manga, I will be there. I hope after all I’ve written that you would like to be there too.

(a page each from Yozora no Sumikko de and Yoake ni Furu. do you see what i'm saying. you seriously see what i'm saying right. that page from yozora literally makes me catch my breath each time i see it. i'm not kidding around!!!!!)

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This write-up was intended to be a short one—for a quarterly round up post—but as I was writing it I found that I had much more to say about Hayakawa Nojico as a comic artist than I had to say about most of the other titles I had begun writing about (sorry other titles!) and I figured that just this was worthy of standing on it’s own as a single post. Perhaps at the end of the year I’ll be able to properly articulate my feelings on Descending Stories: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu (of which I have so much they overwhelmed me and prevented me from articulating anything at all) or compose a thoughtful post comparing Harada’s Color Recipe to Hanasaki Manio’s Kitanai Kimi ga Ichiban Kawaii (which I strongly recommend reading if you’re a fan of Color Recipe.)

Where I am, the songbirds have just about finished returning for spring migration, and I find myself thinking, as I always do during this time of year, of a scene at the end of Kamatani Yuhki’s three volume manga series Hiraeth: The End of the Journey. It’s a moment when the pov character Mika, a grieving and suicidal teenage girl, has arrived to the entrance of Yomi with the intent to die alongside her two immortal companions. However, as she is finally stepping through the gate, she hears birdsong behind her, and she turns around. To her remaining companion still in the clearing outside the entrance, she says this: “I heard a bird sing, so I decided to keep living.”

Since I first read Hiraeth in 2023, that line remains probably the single line in all of fiction that is capable of making me burst into tears without fail each time I think about it.

I bring this moment up because, as I was about halfway through my close-reading of Akuheki, I found myself continuously making a note of a theme that affected me much in the same way as that moment in Hiraeth.

What struck me about Akuheki, a story wrought with violence and aching, is how it revealed itself to be ultimately about the desperate, clinging, human longing to survive. Despite it all; despite the fear, despite the shame, despite the grief, the torment, the pain: it insists that within the ache of being alive there is a voice in us that says, please let me find something worth surviving for.

Have you heard the songbirds in the morning recently? They're exuberant right now. They’re elated to have returned.

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I’m going to begin where it’s obvious: Kojima Youhei wants to die. Or, more specifically, as he says himself, he would like to be killed. We learn after a tumultuous first chapter sex scene that he’s been seeking a “monster”; a sex partner who is willing to take a sadomasochism scene to the point of ultimate finality, and in later chapters are led to understand that this desire stems from the idea of forgetting; of stopping existence where it’s at, bringing an end to the torturous childhood memories that haunt him.

He maintains this pretense to all characters who interact closely with him, and most excruciatingly, to himself. It is in incremental moments that we, as readers, might begin to doubt the veracity of that claim, but I feel that the moments it unraveled the furthest were in the uncovering of Kojima’s childhood.

In learning, at first, that Kojima was groomed and scheduled next in a series of child murders by a mysterious woodsman in the isolated mountains, you may understand Kojima’s suicidal tendencies, wrought by betrayal and a honed desire to reject any who sought to earn his trust.

In learning further that what truly haunts Kojima is his inability to square what he felt earnestly as a child from the woodsman (safety, trust, and, crucially, love) with what had then been ingrained in him by those around him (the woodsman was a vile, evil man, and, aligned with his intentions without knowledge, Kojima was his toy) you may then understand his belief that only a “monster” could love him; and thus his belief that the only natural conclusion to a monster’s love is death at the hands of that monster.

But then, after it all, after the rejection, the running, the fearful weeping acceptance, it is revealed that there was no monster. That what Kojima had felt from the woodsman was true; there was nothing to square at all. It was just love—you may believe that it was that feeling that he craved, and the question he couldn’t ask because he believed he knew the answer already: If I survive, will there be love?

—

The dissolution of one monster was foreshadowed by the same thing occurring to the other much earlier. It is clear, maybe even from before the disclosure of his family’s manipulation in his grandmother’s death, that Daimon Touya was never the monster that Kojima believed he wanted him to be. (You wonder then, if Kojima’s gut-interpretation of Daimon was wrong after all, right from the start—or if, on the notion that Kojima was subliminally seeking someone who would be able to convince him life may be worth surviving, that he selected Daimon quite perfectly.)

But as Daimon’s assuredness in his desire to see Kojima live intensify, Kojima’s own feelings of trust and affection for Daimon butt against his fear of betrayal, sluicing into a painful mess of contradiction. In the scene that I think exemplifies this best, Daimon offers one last time, in what on reread felt like a desperate bid to appease Kojima and keep him by his side, to kill him. In this moment we see Kojima, for the first time thus far in the story, hesitate. He doesn’t agree, he doesn’t express relief, or enthusiasm—he pauses. You can read the painful contradiction in his face before he asks Daimon, “Is that okay...?”

Here is where he realises that this isn’t what he wants from Daimon, he wants something else. Here is where he tells himself no anyway. Here is where he runs, again, to lock himself away in a cage that can’t be opened without a key, and where he, very bravely, I think, leaves that key in Daimon’s palm.

—

It is then that we see Kojima clinging to yes in the cottage. Daimon is going to be happy without him, he’s going to lead a normal life without him, but yes, he has the key. He hasn’t, and he shouldn’t, but if he comes back, there will be a key in his hand and yes, he will be able to turn the lock. He shouldn’t. It would ruin everything Kojima planned, but if he does...

And of course, he does. Daimon returns to him, key in hand, and unlocks the door of that cage, and Kojima can barely put up any resistance because Daimon is finally, finally, finally doing the exact thing that Kojima is finally unafraid to admit that he wants. Later, after learning that yes, it was love, and not monstrosity that haunted him all along, the answer to that once forbidden question is resounding.

“If it’s with you, then I think I can believe in a future.”

I’m going to survive, and there will be love.

—

The conclusion of Kojima’s character arc, and largely what Akuheki as a story comes to is just that: there will be something worth surviving for: the sincere heart of another person, the moment you realise that you can forgive yourself, or perhaps that there was never anything to forgive at all, the freedom that comes with unbinding yourself from expectations, the birdsong in spring.

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Phew! That outro made me cry LOL. Akuheki is good huh. Thank you guys for your patience as I surpassed the time frame that I optimistically suggested I would post this within lol. I’ll admit I was very pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm for Akuheki that I received on the first post only because I haven’t seen it discussed very much in my circles like I have for similar titles, but that enthusiasm made me fret a little about my own writing 😅 But I persevered! I hope my thoughts and ideas could live up to everyone’s expectations and passion for Akuheki that I evidently share.

The upcoming and final post about Akuheki is [rubs my hands together] about Daimon & one of my favourite topics to think about re: BL and other fiction writing at large: deviancy!!!! I’m really excited with what I have planned and written so far.

As said above, I often take quick notes mid-way through reading anything that compels me into doing so. Not so commonly with single volumes, but you bet I have 3000 words in a document on the ten volume Tricornered Window and another 2000 on eight volume Blue Morning. With Akuheki, however, I finished reading the first volume and immediately longed to do a handwritten close-read on it from the beginning.

I’ll explain the process of doing a close read: It’s like taking mandatory notes on readings in a literature class. Take notes to prove you understand what you’ve read. And so, largely what I’m doing is working out and explaining to myself essentially every single character choice and plot movement on the page. This character did this because he’s feeling this way/wanted to get this reaction/this reaction makes him feel this way because of this thing from his past, et cetera. It’s a bit like finding a loose thread on a frayed edge of fabric and pulling it until it becomes free from the weave; untangling characters’ motivation, their fear, their shame, what drives them and why they’re driven in the ways that they are. In between this, I’m elaborating on my understanding by making connections with either the text itself or with an outside text through my own interpretation: this is really interesting to me because…/obsessed with this idea because it calls back to…/this concept and the way it’s written makes me think of… etc. Between that I’m simply writing commentary on what I’m seeing/reading, not only on the events: crazy choice to have this moment here/ sick and twisted way to end this scene, etc, but also on the art itself, the panel choices, the comicking, th-the, um, Daimon in any of the sex scenes… And then in between that, I’m writing “FUCK MY LIIIIFEEEE” and “KILL ME!!!!!” and “SHUT UUUPPPP” and probably also “UKE RIGHTS!!!!!!!”

(open spread of my notebook on one of my forty three pages of notes)

You’ll notice an array of sticky tabs as well that make me look like an impassioned booktuber: these are purely for organisational purposes, they’re used to identify specific sections of writing that are coherent enough to be useful when I’m writing about or otherwise discussing what I’ve taken notes on, labeled with what sort of theme in the text that the section I’m making note of covers.

(excerpted section of my notes in which i'm reiterating a point to myself with the intent to fully understand it)

Some might say, “Ugh, close reading, I haven’t done that since my last literature class, what a slog.” And I wouldn’t disparage you for that feeling—it can take a long time and requires a pretty committed hand—if you’re not having fun reading you won’t have fun note-taking. But when you’re close reading something really fun it’s a blast lol. Taking the time to dig into the particulars of a story, especially one that’s largely character driven and full of complicated, messy characters is really satisfying. The last manga series I close read was CLAMP’s X, which ends (so to speak) at 18 volumes. I read it over a few months and handwrote 53 pages of notes. Akuheki I read initially over a couple days, close read while note taking over about ten, and I wrote forty three pages of notes. It’s 4 volumes. Eek!

If you’ve read Akuheki, you might understand how doing this sort of thing might be useful, and you might believe me when I say that I currently feel the like the premier expert on every machination within it lol. What compelled me pretty immediately into taking close-reading notes on it was the messy, character-driven writing and the impression that it would deliver some truly unhealthy and twisted dynamics, which it did. But I was lucky to be close-reading what became a story that asked its readers to roll the plot beats around in their mouths like hard candies until they started to stick to teeth, because I tend to crunch my hard candies (let convoluted plot points roll over me,) but this time I was paying very close attention, and they melted into total comprehension. And so, if you read Akuheki and didn’t understand one of the wild ride events occurring within, um, I could probably explain it to you lol.

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If, after all that, I’ve intrigued you: I recommend Iimo’s roller coaster BL manga Akuheki with the conviction of someone who has essentially drafted two papers on it purely out of frenzied weepy fascination. I will present caveats out of consideration and honesty: it does contain depictions of sexual violence that go beyond standard fare pseudo-rape BL scenes. They are presented within the text in a grey area which may interest certain readers the same as it may discomfort some. Aside that, you should allow yourself to suspend disbelief regarding some of the plot contrivances in the back half, because upon close inspection, and I’m not kidding, you have to trust me, everything holds up remarkably tightly. And anyway, I’m not writing a critique so that won’t be coming up.

Part one of my two-part theme analysis on Akuheki should hopefully be up by the end of the week, with the second also hopefully within the following week. Their working titles are, respectively: Leaving the key on the doorstep / Letting someone unlock the cage — The innate desire to survive despite it” and “Unearthed, untangle — After much deliberation: spitting in the face of normativity.”

So, I’m reading Hayashi Fumiya's Kemutai Hanashi right now. It’s a carefully yet unfussily illustrated ongoing slice of life that is, at its core, about interrogating social norms by exploring the nuances of human connection and what it means to form and navigate bonds with others. The story is centered around two young adult men who find themselves in a close personal relationship that by society's standards defies a simple label. They’re not in a romantic or sexual relationship, nor does the story imply that that is the intended end result for them, but the relationship that they are in surpasses, to each of them, what they feel the word “friendship” or “best friends” implies.

It is a story that is wrought with subtleties and treats its more tender moments with a very slow and patient hand. As well, thus far, it has made me sob in real life more than once.

Unfortunately, (or fortunately, given the intro) I am not writing this blog post to talk about Kemutai Hanashi, (though I would like to dedicate time to it at some point.) I’m here to write about a short (yes, single volume) (I KNOW) BL manga that I saw recommended to readers of Kemutai Hanashi as something with a similar theme that they may enjoy. I wanted a break from crying, so I said, “Sure, yeah, let me at it,” and I began reading Higure Kure’s Ai da nante Iwanai kara, or “We Won’t Call it Love”.

If you’ve read Ai da nante Iwanai kara, you might know where I’m going to go here, because from what I’ve found it seems to be a little… um, controversial regarding whether readers liked or disliked the ending.

I’m writing this blog post because I disliked it. Like, a lot. Like, upon finishing it I immediately opened my reading spreadsheet and somehow through pure enlightened vitriol banged out 700 words of pure distaste into the notes of my entry on it.

Ch. 4 - Touji after Yachiyo's wedding having his boohoo moment. lol? sorry

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For the sake of my criticism, I will lay out the entire plot right now, including the conclusion. If you would like to read it and form your own opinion before I take the time to demolish it, I recommend doing so now. It’s only one volume! The art is lovely. But watch out!

Ai da nante Iwanai kara is a story where our main character, Touji, and his high school best friend / almost lover but not quite, Yachiyo, see each other (they do not interact) as adults after years of no contact at Yachiyo’s… wedding! Uh oh! Touji has a freak out about it, realises that when Yachiyo confessed to him at the end of high school he meant like, love love, and finds himself in the bed of a stranger, Kiyoto, in a desperate and misguided attempt to find out if he could have fallen in love with Yachiyo in high school through finding out if he could successfully fuck men. Or in this case get fucked. Yay bottoming! Not the best strategy, but at the least loosely elucidates something for Touji: he comes to a sort of messy understanding that he wouldn’t want to have the type of casual, fun, feel good but feeling-free sex with Yachiyo that he is having with this stranger, and that he largely mostly feels guilty about not understanding himself nor Yachiyo. The stranger suggests that they date each other, just to see, just to find out if they could fall in love, if Touji could fall in love with a man, and by extension, could have fallen in love with Yachiyo. Sounds like a bad idea, but that’s how some fun always starts, right?

You learn after a two year time-skip that Touji and Kiyoto, the stranger who fucked him (yay bottoming!) are indeed in a long term relationship and have been since the previous scene ended. They seem well suited to each other and perfectly content. Dun dun dunnnn etc.

I’ll speed things up here.

Touji and Yachiyo meet again at Touji’s grandmothers funeral after those two years and you begin to learn various things about Yachiyo through subsequent meetings:

He got divorced. Yay divorce! His now ex-wife is the one who asked him to marry her and also requested the divorce—it was a mutual loveless marriage that didn’t work but perhaps could have were Yachiyo not a depressive gay man.

Touji made multiple attempts to contact Yachiyo after they graduated high school, which Yachiyo ignored due to his own internalised shame and fear of not being loved back, which was validated by his not fully understood high school confession to Touji.

Yachiyo’s character has ^ that hangup explained by vague childhood memories of repeatedly being told that he needs to be independant. This is pretty underdeveloped but serves its point somewhat.

Throughout the next few chapters, we see Kiyoto grappling pretty reasonably with his feelings of jealousy as Touji continues to attempt navigating Yachiyo’s returned presence in his life. I say “pretty reasonably” because his jealousy is very reasonable and because he grapples with it in a relatively patient and reasonable way. Well, all I can say is that I think that he’s a good boyfriend lol. Touji, for his part, seems to be struggling to make sense of the version of Yachiyo that he knew in high school compared to the version of Yachiyo that he has in front of him, who now seems distant and tired. He longs for that high school version of their relationship, and feels guilty for that complicated longing.

Later, Kiyoto visits his family, primarily to see his lapsed catholic uncle (I laughed too don’t worry) who gave up priesthood to marry and start a farm (yay farming!) They have a discussion that revolves around the ideas of making choices without regrets and wanting to be loved without expecting love in return versus wanting to be loved and loved back completely. Kiyoto wants the latter. He frames this as selfish, though as readers with human relationships ourselves we understand that this is obviously not selfish, and is in fact very reasonable.

On the train home, Kiyoto asks a sleepy Touji if he ever wanted to reunite with Yachiyo, to which Touji says, “No, I didn’t.”

All good? You’re following?

Right at the beginning of the final chapter we learn that Kiyoto broke up with Touji following that conversation, citing his attachment to Yachiyo, which reared its head seemingly only after they re-met at Touji’s grandmother’s funeral as a roadblock that Touji seemingly cannot get past. Touji is confused, upset, and obviously, does not want to break up. Kiyoto insists. To Kiyoto, there is no way forward for them with Yachiyo in the picture. Referring to Touji’s negative response in regard to his earlier questioning of his desire to reunite with Yachiyo, Kiyoto tells him that he simply expected that Touji would, eventually. (How faithless, you may say! How cynical! What an unkind reading of Touji on Kiyoto’s part—his boyfriend of two years! “But zoë,” you may say, “Did they not begin dating on the notion of discovering whether Touji could have fallen in love with Yachiyo in high school?” Certainly, they did. But did that come up in Kiyoto’s own interrogation of their relationship, or even in Touji’s in the present timeline or in their new conflict revolving around jealousy? Readers, I say with emphasis, it did not.)

And so, Touji and Yachiyo reunite and Touji lets out all of his various feelings which I don’t have in me to summarize due to it being an entire chapter of meandering waffling about guilty misunderstandings, and the manga concludes upon them making a promise to continue their relationship in whatever way it may take going forward, whether that way being love or friendship or something indescribable via label—they just want it to exist.

Ch. 4 - Kiyoto and Touji on the train home before everything GOES WRONG!!!!

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It’s now Saturday morning and I’m sitting at the kitchen table considering whether my distaste for the way the story ended largely stems from my impatience with the way it walked itself into the “childhood first love prevails above all else” cliché, or whether the initial vitriolic claim that I made to myself when I wrote my unkind 700 word note was accurate; a claim purporting that Higure Kure’s following through on the obviously intended game plan with Touji and Yachiyo was a failure to understand that the story had canted to one side such that it did not support that game plan any longer. I figure it’s a bit of both, and that I should write all of this anyway because, well, a little criticism is always worth the time!

So, here we go. I think that the story being told in Ai da nante Iwanai kara was done wrong by poor writing choices that served the “first love prevails” cliché, and thus failed the writing of all characters involved. As well, I’m tired of reading about the idea, 💢 and I didn’t like it! 💢 Do I believe that this was the story that Higure intended to write from the moment they picked up their pen? Absolutely. 100% yes. Touji and Yachiyo being together was the obvious intentional endgame from the very first chapter—seriously, they wrote the bonus chapters before the rest of the story, the plan was never to have Touji and Kiyoto be the endgame of this.

But the issue is that the continued writing of story and characters, particularly of Kiyoto and Touji, led me while reading to believe in the possibility of an ending to the story that explored the potential dynamics of all three of the characters involved in a nuanced and thoughtful way.

While reading, there existed a feeling of anguished anxiety in me the further along I got in the story. I’ll be succinct: it was dread. That dread present here was a feeling that could only exist alongside hope, or else it would simply have been resignation; that feeling of dread could not have existed without the tension of possibility. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure that Higure was going to go through with what I dreaded they would. I clung to the desperate hope that perhaps this story was going to be about something more nuanced than the fulfillment of the “first love prevails” trope. Will Kiyoto present Touji with an ultimatum that will fracture both their relationship and Touji’s relationship with Yachiyo? Will Touji come to his own conclusion, perhaps be honest with Yachiyo: we have lingering feelings for each other, but I am going to prioritise my current lover and therefore we need to be able to work out how to move on from each other romantically, yet I still want you in my life—would the nature of their relationship shift and change into something that can hold both regret and joy? Would Yachiyo be able to do that? Will the story explore the idea of multiple different types of love and how to navigate them in conjunction with each other—something that we all have to do within our own lives?

Will it instead end how I dread that it’s going to?

Now, as you have likely assumed, I don’t tend to like “first love prevails” as a storytelling commonality because, frankly, I think it’s childish. Can it be done in a way that prioritises character development and complicated relationship dynamics? Sure, every trope ever can be done well with a deft hand. But the fact that this was not was what frustrated me the most about it.

Kiyoto’s conversation with his uncle in the second to final chapter, as mentioned above, depicted him expressing that he wanted Touji’s love wholly, he didn’t want to share it, or have it threatened by Yachiyo’s presence in their lives. To enact upon this desire, Higure has him point blank break up with Touji instead of allowing the two of them to have a conversation about it, risking a messy and, more importantly, because this is a story, interesting human interaction. Higure immediately de-prioritised Kiyoto’s place in Touji’s life and even Kiyoto’s own place in the story thus far—he was't even presented to have tried. Giving him the space and time to work through his own feelings only to conclude that the choice that he would make is to Give Up After All is both amazingly uninteresting and disappointing if you as a reader had any investment whatsoever in Kiyoto’s character. Was the point of him in the story not to create tension? To become invested in his and Touji’s relationship and worry for what would come of him during the conclusion of the story? That’s certainly what happened to me; he was a thoughtful, patient boyfriend who took a risk for Touji at the beginning and found that it paid off for him in Touji being a lover who had seemed to let go of his old high school regret and choose Kiyoto after all—I was, as they say, rooting for him!

However, much to my dismay, Kiyoto did not show up a single time after the break-up scene, he was mentioned by Touji as “my ex,” (who he somehow hurt but still loves!) and all of Touji’s complicated feelings are wound around Yachiyo and needing to have Yachiyo in his life, despite there being no evidence in the story to prove that he felt pulled toward or tortured by the existence of Yachiyo during the years of he and Kiyoto’s relationship—other than the existence of a high school uniform button that was exchanged on the last day Touji and Yachiyo saw each other. I have a plastic pickle that a friend gave me in high school whom I have not spoken to since high school graduation that I keep because it reminds me fondly of him. Mementos are not the sole indicators of grieved yearning—the readers need to be convinced of it. As far as I could tell, Touji and Kiyoto were perfectly content and secure in their relationship prior to Yachiyo’s reintroduction into Touji’s life.

Yachiyo was the character who was wrought by grieved yearning! Guys, his wife told him he needs to move on the evening that they got MARRIED! But instead of giving his character any shot at growth or movement through his tormented longing, Higure just rewarded him for it. Congratulations! Your insecurities and inability to get over your high school first love got you the guy back and you didn’t have to do a thing! And your ex-wife had to pay for all those divorce fees! All you needed to do was mope a little and then when Touji cried in the bathroom because he was freaked out and confused because his boyfriend broke up with him because of you, you just needed to reassure him that he’s worth loving, which readers might have been pretty sure was your problem, and not his, but that’s not important I guess. You win!

The character who had to bear the weight of every other character's ungenerous choices and behaviour was Touji, who had all of his load-bearing decisions thrust upon him by others. Yachiyo invited him to his wedding after years of ignoring Touji’s efforts to connect. Kiyoto said, “We should date.” Later, Kiyoto decided that Touji needed to prioritise Yachiyo. Yachiyo stood around while Touji frantically tried to understand that decision, and then said, “We can be friends,” and his own issues were resolved without development so he could say, “It’s okay Touji, what do you want? I’m happy with anything.” Finally, Touji admits that he doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know what choices to make, and he doesn’t know if he can interrogate Yachiyo’s and his own feelings without hurting Yachiyo, and then he cries and reiterates all of that for many pages, and it juuuuust felt… from a writer’s perspective… indulgent.

Ch. 5 - Touji having another boohoo moment, for some reason

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The thing at the end of all of this is that Ai da nante Iwanai kara felt like it was so close to being about accepting the consequences of your actions, not letting the regrets of your youth hold power over your adult relationships, and about moving on. It might have been a careful and bittersweet musing on how letting go of regrets that cling to you like grease can grant you a kind and generous future that you deserve. About learning to live with and sit with that regret and then making the choice to let it go, or even the choice to have it simply exist in your life but not control you.

But it is, because it was the initial idea that Higure Kure had when beginning this story, not about any of those things. A story where moving on is not an option granted; where the choice to let go of the joy in front of you to chase after something unknown from your youth is the right choice. Where first love prevails against all else.

Like, this is the issue I had with the end of Tamifull’s How Do We Relationship! First love changes you, and impacts you profoundly in ways that can leave you with regrets and bitterness, it did for Yachiyo, and the reintroduction of Yachiyo in Touji’s life did so for him. But the culmination of this story being that the lingering regrets over your high school first love deserve to be meditated on and prioritised despite your current adult relationships is so frustratingly childish and simply rang as pure, uninteresting indulgence.

—

Now finally, to bring it back to that comparison to Kemutai Hanashi: I need to make this clear: there is no stock behind the “ambiguous relationship” angle between the two leads here at the end of this story. There is this idea perpetuated by Touji when the two of them are teenagers that he and Yachiyo “have something special that isn’t bound by specifics," which is a little weird because that feeling is pretty markedly one-sided. Yachiyo is in love with Touji. Touji doesn’t understand what that feeling is and so describes the feeling as indescribable… but Yachiyo describes it as love, and then when Touji doesn’t share that specific feeling he tunnels himself into ashamed isolation. Like…?

At the end of the story, the characters talk about the relationship being ambiguous, being without label, but you cannot read this story and honestly believe that the intention by Higure was to ever have the ultimate conclusion of their relationship be that they will continue to have an “ambiguous” relationship going forward. You made Touji’s sweetheart boyfriend BREAK UP with him so he could have an “ambiguous relationship” with his high school first love? Get real lol. If Touji and Yachiyo don’t have gay sex in the unnecessary continuation of this manga, (which, by the way, was only requested by publishers after the conclusion of this volume in discussion, or so I hear!) I’ll eat my shoes. And seriously, while I’m in the midst of reading Kemutai Hanashi? Fuck off.

—

Anyway! I don’t really tend to write thorough criticisms like this because I’m too busy being a LOVER and an ENTHUSIAST! But this one pissed me off very deeply on a level I did not think was capable for a single volume bl, and so this had to be done.

As usual anything that I've listed is technically a recommendation even if I do disparage a little bit! All summaries are my own and may be lightly spoilery.

Kimi no Sumire: Your Spring Flower / Arima Arashi 2019-, 2 vol. Published in eng by Animate. A high school BL where a sweetheart baby cutie (lol) finds himself the unexpected subject of attention of the school's so-called madonna, a gorgeous and mysterious upperclassman, and also unexpectedly, he likes it.

I actually read this one for the first time in 2025 and was like, “Yeah, that was nice!,” and then for a reason I can’t quite recall (probably saw a screenshot on twitter) I decided to reread it and its second volume at the beginning of this year and found myself completely captivated in a completely unexpected way. Kimi no Sumire as a BL is uncomplicated, and there’s not really any what I might call… juice… or tension… but I really liked it lol. Full of what I referred to as in my spreadsheet as “brain-explode moments” where the timid and shy Sumire does something particularly bold (topping????? licking his boyfriend????) that were very thrilling to me upon my second visit to Kimi No Sumire. Also the sound effects in the Animate publication are all hand redrawn, which is always a treat to see.

My Noons and Midnights Are For You / Luria 2023-, 1 vol. Published in eng by Tokyopop. Super depressed vtuber who gets fucked into self-confidence by his manager, who was actually obsessed with him the entire time.

Okay, I’m not sure if I actually think this is like, good. But it’s not my fault that I read nocori’s THE HANDSOME SALESMAN FROM WORK IS THE IDEAL MASTER (title presented in all caps to express personal emphasis and a little bit of embarrassment) last year and afterwards, bdsm verbal humiliation in BL became very fascinating to me. There is some of that in Noons and Midnights, okay, and I found it very compelling, okay!!! And isn’t it awesome when the seme is a little deranged and obsessed? Everyone say yes zoë in response, quick. This one isn’t asking a lot of the reader, unlike some of the titles following, but I liked reading it, so I’ve just got to mention it here.

Shoot Juliet Down / Katsura Komachi 2021-, 1 vol. Published in eng by Kodansha. The rising star at a host club finds himself entranced by the current no.1 host, the cold and elusive Juri, whose unpleasant secrets begin to unravel the closer the two get.

Great first volume, surprised me how well the tension worked here especially with how quickly it developed. The tension in this first volume could have been stretched into 2 or even 3 volumes, but the fact that it wasn’t did not work to its detriment, which is very impressive lol. Really enjoyed what seemed to be some extreme toxic behaviour on the part of both of the leads, and I happily anticipate that there will be more of it, and optimistically hope that it gets worse! 👍

Chikutaku Bonbon / Katsuta Bun 2009-11, 3 vol. No official eng publication. A short josei set in the Taisho era, revolving around a boisterous girl doing manual labour for a retired actress and the mysterious young man whom she rescues from a fainting incident, who may be a vampire?

This was a reread, I’ve read this one like three or four times in the past ten years. It's short, I like the setting, and it's cute! I find the art style and main character very charming, it’s a light read, it makes me happy? What else is there! And there’s a mean cranky guy with glasses.

Kokoro o Korosu Houhou (How to Kill a Heart) / Kashio 2014-2017, 4 vol. Was officially published on mangaplanet by futekiya but that’s fucked, so, sorry! It’s out there though. I don't want to summarize this one :/ but i will. It's about two stepbrothers, the younger of whom emotionally manipulates and sexually abuses the older, and about the ways that that manipulation and abuse deteriorates both of their well-being while also driving them towards each other again and again in a viscous, brutal pirouette of torment and anguish and suffering etc etc etc.

Well. Okay, so here’s the thing. I read a bunch of brother incest BL in February—no, don’t leave, you didn’t hate when I wrote about Harada’s Nii-chan last year, right? Aren’t we here to read things that challenge us? Isn’t incest an interesting conduit to explore the idea of “deviancy” through? The emotional complications that arise due to feelings of guilt, of repression, fear and joy? Of power imbalance fueled not purely by heterosexual and sociopatriarchal norms, but by those alongside the complex and unique social relationships between two siblings ? Do you see what I’m saying here—writing about queerness through the lens of an incestual relationship is really intriguing. That sounds like the beginning of a much longer and more in depth post, so I’m going to stop there, because I probably have to go write that now. But the point here is about Kokoro o Korosu Houhou, which I found deeply intruiging. VERY! feel-bad read though, so maybe if you’re not the kind of person who read Sakura Gari and thought to yourself, “Wow! I need to find more BL that makes me feel exactly like that did (quite bad)!” then don’t put this one on your list. Yet. Otherwise just wait and I’m going to write a really compelling post about incest BL that may or may not convince you.

X / CLAMP 1992-2003, 18 vol. (unfinished) Published in eng by Viz. Set months before a predicted apocalypse, an anguished teenager is at the forefront of every important decision regarding the future of humankind while his companions fall apart around him.

Yes, I finished CLAMP X! It’s likely that I’ll write some sort of longer and more in depth post about my feelings on X, so I will attempt to be brief here. I will share that I bravely decided to take extensive notes as I read this one, and concluded my read with fifty three pages of handwritten notes in my A5 notebook. This is a lot. There’s a lot to say! Do I personally recommend that you, if you have not, read X? Maybe not, but if you want to read the greatest love story ever crafted (very genuinely saying this), you should read Tokyo Babylon and then read X to complete the story of Subaru and Seishirou. It’s [large truck drives by slowly] [sound of crying and violence (punching the ground, kicking walls) comes from behind it] [the truck passes completely and I remain, covered in blood and smiling serenely] really something! I’ll say something controversial as well and admit that I would be content with it being incomplete forever; what I got out of the story and its themes even unfinished was kind of… profound? Maybe this is because I read it extremely closely and am engaged in lengthy conversation with a friend about every detail that interested us, but I feel satisfied by what it is and what it was presenting, incomplete as it is.

Hanakoi Tsurane / Natsume Isaku 2015-24, 10 vol. No official eng publication. Two young kabuki actors from rival families begin acting together when the rivalry that kept them from doing so ends, and as they fall in love they must face challenges to their relationships from those closest to them.

I read this! I liked it. Reading it did convince me that I’m content not reading any of Natsume Isaku’s other BL, and so I got to remove Candy Color Paradox from my to-read list. To be clear, I truly have nothing reeaallly negative to say about Hanakoi Tsurane. I enjoy reading stories that are unashamed to be completely earnest and well-meaning and hopeful, and it definitely charmed me. But it didn’t really have any emotional highs, or really even any emotional lows. I want full-fisted tension! The tension in Hanakoi was presented nicely in the palm of a cupped hand, and then fingers were closed over it and the hand was tucked into a pocket. I like my tension to be dangled pointedly in front of me just out of reach, or writhing and biting and barely containable in two fists. The stakes of Hanakoi were presented to be high but were never depicted to be taken with true severity by the two leads—the main tension in a plot hinging on the perceived cultural loss of ending your patriarchal line is something that can be pretty juicy to explore, but when the lead characters go, “Well, we’re gonna do it :)” without being presented to have any complicated feelings about the choice, it’s actually pretty boring. Unfortunate! I did like it, I promise, it just didn’t convince me that Natsume Isaku is writing stories that will really affect me emotionally, and that’s what I want the most out of what I read.

X / CLAMP 1992-2003, 18 vol. Read (half) in March

Have tragically (or maybe for the better?) only read the first nine volumes of X thus far, but it deserves a spot on this list for how bad it made me feel. Man what the hell. When Subaru meets Seishirou for the first time in ten years, and the first thing he does is light his cigarette for him ?????????? [clutches at my hair in agony]. And the sudden inclusion of the tragic lesbian one-sided (?) romance/obsession that ends in a love propelled self-sacrifice? Whatever the hell is going on with Shirou Kamui???? Don’t let my suffering hold you back ladies, lay it all down, I wanted to feel like this! I can’t wait to find out how Subaru and Seishirou reconcile and work it out in the back half of X! Just kidding. I can’t wait to find out how they kill each other (???) and how terrible it will all feel, and how terrible it will feel when I get to the end and there’s like three chapters remaining forever. When I finish it next year it will surely show up on a list such as this once more. Thanks CLAMP!

Happy of the End / Ogerestu Tanaka 2020-23, 3 vol. Read in March, September, and! November

Made me feel bad. What else is there to say. I love when a character makes a choice that makes them (and the readers) feel bad but for storytelling purposes it’s the best choice. I never want to read another story where the characters make the boring choice. Don’t indulge me! Send your romantic lead to suffer for his actions dictated by his own negative self perception! Make him cry with longing and grief! Let him come back to his lover only when he can no longer stand to wallow in his self-hatred alone because he craves love even when he does not believe that he deserves it! Personally I like to crack open my long (long) awaited copy of the third volume of this just to read the part where Haoran goes to Chihiro’s photo exhibition to make himself feel bad, and then he sits on the stairs and cries. Awesome stuff. What the hell.

One Room Angel / Harada 2019, 1 Vol. Read in March

MADE ME FEEL SO BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!! LIKE WHAT DO YOU MEAN!!!!!!!!!! Sat in bed after finishing this and tried so so hard not to disturb my sleeping girlfriend as I clutched my chest and sobbed. Like, man. Whatever. Thanks Harada. When Kuma finally publishes the physical of this in english you know I will be there, even if it’s delayed 6 times, I will be there.

Onii-sama e… / Ikeda Riyoko 1974, 3 vol. Read in April

Wow……. my cool and beautiful tragic butches…. Thank you Ikeda Riyoko…….. Everyone should make sure that they read this because it’s awesome, first of all, and second of all—oh my god. Man. What the hell man. Guys, my—my beautiful and tragic butches….

The Heart of Thomas / Hagio Moto 1974, 3 vol. Read in April

Let’s get melodramatic at the German boarding school, stat! Let’s reject our own feelings due to trauma! Let’s allow guilt to govern us and force our hands to clench when there are open hands held our way! Let’s yearn! Let’s repress it! Let’s scream and cry and shout!

Kitanai Kimi Ga Ichiban Kawaii / Manio 2019-22, 5 vol. Read in October

Ouch, owie! Cutting and terrible and romantic. This is just oozing with that co-dependent desperation that made me want to claw at my hair. What if love and control felt the same? What if they were the same? If you give up control, does love replace all the empty places you’ve left inside you? Or is it something else? Juicy!!!!!!!

The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window / Yamashita Tomoko 2013-20, 10 vol. Read in November

Around the midway point of this story, actually at the precise moment that Mikado (reasonable adult character) tells Erika (burdened teenage girl character) “It’s not selfish to ask for help” I started crying and am not sure that I stopped doing so until the end. WOW!!!!!!! The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window, huh. The bl in this isn’t even what made me feel the worst it was seriously about Erika. Stop making teenage characters who take everything onto themselves and who then get overwhelmed when there are suddenly adults around them who are like “Please rely on us,” it makes me FREAK OUT!!!!

The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese / Mizushiro Setona 2004-06, 2 Vol. Read in December

Texted my friends a series of messages while reading this which ranged from “I LOVE YAOI” to “[rending my hair and gnawing on my wrist]” and “[IN SERIOUS MENTAL DISTRESS] DON'T READ THE CORNERENED [sic] MOUSE DREAMS OF CHEESE” and then “maybe the cornered mouse.... will receive cheese?” so that about details how I feel about it. What if you were earth’s most repressed man and you got manipulated by some annoying freak who desperately wants you and you fell in love with him… you think? No, no no, that isn’t what happened. You didn’t fall in love, it’s just that you’re easily manipulated because you’re afraid to take anything seriously, especially not an important feeling like love. And anyway, you’re not sexually attracted to men at all. Right? Wait a minute, but is that guy the only person you’ve ever wanted to keep coming back? But that’s just because he manipulated you, right? Love isn’t the same thing as desperation. But in the absence of any other feeling, is it wrong to think of it as love? Do you want it to be love? Does it feel better when you think of it as love? Or does it feel worse? Would you give up everything for it? You would? I see.

Wooowwza what can I say. What can I say about The Cornered Mouse Dreams of Cheese? Nothing, everything, I don’t know. Made me feel sick and bad and crazy. Don’t read this one. Please read it. What a mess. What a maddening and sublime interrogation into the psyches of two characters who are desperate for something that they refuse to articulate.

Sakura-Gari / Watase Yuu 2007-10, 3 Vol. Read in December

Oh boy. What, you want me to write my feelings out about Sakura-gari? I don’t want to do that. No, I don’t want to, I’m scared, I can’t do it! No, no! Truthfully, I am in fact having a hard time articulating anything at all about Sakura-gari. I’ll say that, after I completed it, I went on a mostly unsuccessful pursuit to find bl manga that made me feel the same way that Sakura-gari did. This knocked me to my knees, kicked me in the gut, and when I stifled a cry into my fist it said, “Well, what did you think was going to happen?” I think it’s brilliant and tragic and [looking you in the eyes] if you’ve never read it: this is not a recommendation, unless you want it to be.

A gutting exploration of how the cycle of abuse and violence stymies a person’s ability to understand their own desires and how to act on them, and doing it wrong. A torrent of wrongs! A hot, stinging wave of wrongs! Ack! Argh!

Blue Morning / Hidaka Shoko 2009-17, 8 Vol. Read in December

Haha, wow… to write about the meandering and sober melodrama of Blue Morning after failing to talk about Sakura-gari… But not to fear, I ended my year with this one, I'm happy to write about it. Just superb stuff happening here. Failing to come to an understanding over and over again despite continuously attempting to do right by each other, losing your sense of self after falling in love…. because it causes you to make decisions based on emotion (which scares you) rather than cool calculation (your default), running away but always coming back because being loved by another feels good despite the anxiety it brings you… AND you’re a THIRTY year old BUTLER and the person you’ve fallen in love with is a lovesick eighteen year old whom you raised for the last eight years who is your young master. Ugh, the agonies! Blue Morning has a lot of cogs spinning while all of that goes on, namely its Meiji Restoration noble system machinations, the set dressing for its agonies. Awesome. Made me clutch my hair and stomp my feet.

Narita-kun wo Semetai! / Izumi Mio 2022, 2 Vol. Read in March

Hysterical. This is the only manga on this list that I’m going to summarize because I think it’s funny and I want to. This is about an eleventh grade high school fujoshi who posts mediocre bl comics on her twitter. She watches a handsome playboy in her grade get knocked over by stray cats (very moe) outside school and thus attempts to recruit him to be the uke model for her bl. Obviously, it turns out that he is the perfect uke, and also she is the perfect seme (?).

Within that it directly tackles toxic masculinity and the ultimate power of being a traditional uke, ie being protected and submissive. Attempts within its two volumes to dismantle the idea of weakness as inferiority. Uke rights!

The Sword of Paros / Kurimoto Kaoru (writer) & Igarashi Yumiko (illus.) 1986-87, 3 vol. Read in April

Contains many of the common themes addressed in the 70-80s shoujo cross-dressing woman who has the soul of a man concept, but I particularly enjoy how they’re done here.

At the end of it all, this story chose to give power and control to the gender-weird character and allowed her (/he/they/however you feel like interpreting) the freedom to live their own life. Felt pretty awesome to read!

Marginal / Hagio Moto 1985-87, 5 vol. Read in April

Have spoken briefly about Marginal before, but heavily grapples with both hands the concepts of autonomy, personhood, and the right of choice, all under the frame specifically of womanhood and pregnancy. There are almost no female characters in this, and it’s a sci-fi that occurs on a desert planet. “So how did she—?” Just trust me.

Tonari Ni / Basso (Natsume Ono) 2018, 1 vol. Read in April (what a month!)

Getting a crush on a hot middle aged man can actually be the most awesome thing in the world. Depicted the feeling of it so expertly that I personally feel as if I understand what it’s like to get a crush on a hot middle aged man in real life, despite having never done this. Explores that feeling alongside the trials of being an underpaid, overworked cog in a system and also doing things for yourself even when people tell you you shouldn’t. Love this one a lot, I really recommend giving it a read.

Captivated, By You / Wayama Yama 2019, 1 vol. Read in May

Debated between having this or Wayama’s Let’s Go Karaoke! on this list, but there’s so much bl on the next list that I figured I’d give everyone a preemptive break. “Karaoke isn’t anymore bl than Captivated is, zoë,” you may say. Well, of course they both have bl subtext, but, yes, it is. Anyway! Captivated asks the question, “What if there was a weird guy who entranced everyone around him by accident? TWICE?” (Twice!) I guess this one doesn’t have complicated central themes that make me ponder but I think it’s deeply, deeply funny and I wanted it listed on a list and it doesn’t fit on the final list I’m writing.

How Do We Relationship / Tamifull 2018-25, 14 vol. Read in July

The core of this series is about things not working out and grappling with the consequences of that, and finding out a way to live your life despite it. Thus, I took issue with how it ended, but in this case we can say that it is about the journey and not the destination, yada yada. What it had to say throughout I found very compelling and I want to write about it here because of that.

Depicts quite thoroughly what it’s like trying to find the points of connection between two people and how actually and genuinely difficult that work can be. At how, yeah, you’re going to fuck it up because two people can’t ever really fundamentally understand each other without fucking it up sometimes. It’s hard to be good when you don’t know what you’re doing, and you either have to try or you have to give up, or do one until you realise you should have done the other. Also has some awesome toxic lesbian sex in it!

Naraku No Hanazo / Sakasana 2022-24, 2 vol. Read in October

A tragic and lovely story about three young girls whose separate upbringings of neglect and abuse stifle and twist the ways that they’re able to connect with and understand each other, but who try their best to do so anyway. The ending actually surprised me into a burst of happy tears.

Zetsubou Ni Nake / Shinou Ryo 2017-20, 2 vol. Read in November

Gotta get one plaintive howl out for this one. Awoo, etc etc. Messy human drama about rape, revenge, longing, and self disgust, how all of those things tangle together in an aching knot that seems to hurt the more you struggle to untangle it.

Smoke Blue No Ame Nochi Hare / Hamada Kamome 2021-, 8 vol. Read in December

Of course, I made a blog post about this, but I could make three, it’s got so much that I find interesting about it! Mostly this is a story about the mundanity of life and what’s contained within it. It grapples with the changes that come with aging (in your own life but also in your aging relatives' lives) and the value of maintaining connections as you experience all those changes. And the choice not to define a relationship that brings you comfort, and rather than having that lack of definition stifle it, it’s able to flourish over time into permanency. An unusual perspective in the genre that found I was very pleased to witness. Honestly this might be my favourite thing I’ve read all year. I really, really connected with it.

There is only one review for this on mangaupdates (only manga info website I tolerate looking at) written by user EugeneOregonFujoshi, which contains within it the line, “this story focuses on real life in a way that elevates it with reverence.” I find that that so precisely describes what I enjoy about Smoke Blue that I wanted to include it here instead of trying to further wax poetic about it. You can read the rest of their review at the bottom of the page here.

Nii-chan / Harada 2014-17, 1 Vol. Read in December

Coming in cold to toss this one last on this list lol. You’ve gotta be a certain type of bl reader to put this one on a favourites list, and luckily for you all, I am! [weary thumbs up emoji]. Deeply intriguing work that’s both uncomfortable to stomach and impossible to look away from. Digs a fist into the cyclical nature of sexual violence and abuse, what it means to satisfy yourself at the expense of others, and what it means to deserve what you got, whether that be punishment or the opposite, revenge. And how much of a difference is there between those two, anyway. Nasty piece of work. Thanks Harada as always!

CLOVER / CLAMP 1997-99, 4 vol. Read in January

Striking page layouts, sharp thin lines that easily draw focus to them. Some pages of this are a single panel, some are a collection of panels straight down the middle, occasionally a lavish and bizarre background surrounds a bizarre looking character rendered with a delicacy that CLAMP excelled in here. A lot of white space, but used in a way that I found affecting. I think this is one of the most beautiful looking things that CLAMP has ever made, and I wish they'd made more of it.

Touch Within the Abyss / Mori Moyori 2021, 1 vol. Read in February

Gorgeous, heavily detailed art, which I enjoyed so much that it bolstered my opinion of this story quite strongly. The pov character looked like he woke up and did his thick eyeliner daily with the intent to make himself look more exhausted and hard-done-by than he already seemed to naturally look. Sexy! I think this was able to strike the balance between delicacy and impact and it really worked for me.

10 Dance / Inoue Satou 2011-, 8 vol. Read in April

Okay, the thing about 10dance is that personally, I think the art style is like, well. I think it’s ugly. Have described it to friends as “balls to the walls ugly” and “amazingly unpleasant to look at”. But I also think that the way that Inoue illustrates movement, specifically, of course, the movement of dance, is completely captivating. The action in this is executed masterfully; the dancing scenes were exciting and visually strong and momentous, the expressions were great, the lines of action were done with full intent and follow-through. Particularly, the dance scenes in the park were genuinely beautifully rendered and expressed and made me quite emotional.

An Invitation From A Crab / panpanya 2014, 1 vol. Read in September

Heh. This one is awesome. If you’re reading this list, you’ve gotta get your hands on An Invitation From A Crab. The juxtaposition between the incredibly detailed, scratchy backgrounds and the simple, cute pov character is just a blast to see. This is a real treat to look at. I think this is masterful and I don’t have much complex to say about it but I’ll give it two visual comparisons and say that I enjoyed reading Invitation more than either thing I’m going to compare it to: Igarashi Daisuke’s Witches (which I enjoyed visually but not much on any other level) and Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tekkonkinkreet (which I have not read in many years and have little to say about at the moment).

Double / Noda Ayako 2019-, 5 vol. Read in October

Double has a lot of impressive things going for it, but I find the core of its strength to me lies in its depiction of human physicality, and for that reason I’m putting it in this list. The way that the characters grip each other, the way that hands manipulate skin, bodies twist against each other, flesh bending and molding to pressure… yum!!!!! And the expressions! Maybe you’d like to read Double for the codependent actors rewiring their lives without each other and then desperately pawing at ways to pull back together, or maybe you’d like to see what I’m talking about, visually, but either way, whew! This one is special.

Firefly Wedding / Tachibana Oreco 2023-, 10 vol. Read in October

Like with Double, there’s a lot that I enjoy about Firefly Wedding. Visually, part of this is because Tachibana is a beautiful illustrator who clearly endeavours to place every fold of every robe in precise accurate detail, and enjoys doing so, and because she draws an awesome crying weeping sobbing face, (thank you Satoko for being a crybaby!) but what compelled me into reading 60 chapters of it in one night (until 4am??????) is, sorry to admit, Shinpei. He is like a weird little bug in a jar to me that I cannot look away from. Sure, sure, an aspect of this is that he makes me go “kyaa!!!” when he’s being particularly unpleasant and annoying or terrible, and his cat-like expressions charm and endear me, but he’s also just so cute. He’s cute! Like if a bug was a cat was a tortured weird man with a charming predilection for violence and killing. You know what I mean!

^ bug

Life In Smokey Blue (which is the official english subtitle printed onto the Japanese volumes) is not published in officially english (yet?), and is ongoing (as far as I could tell) with 8 volumes out currently in Japanese. Scans are up to vol 5. I started it yesterday and finished it today, and I liked it so much that I wanted to write about it immediately. I’m not even letting my thoughts percolate about this one, I’ve got to get my feelings out right away!

Briefly, Life In Smokey Blue is about two men in their late thirties who were colleagues in their twenties, and meet again for the first time in eight years. They both have separate lives, but begin to do translation work together (which I don’t discuss in this post, but the act of translating eng - jpn is a consistent theme throughout the story and is one of it’s most interesting aspects), and also begin to hook up and maintain an intimate relationship.

I think what I like most about Life In Smokey Blue is the way the two main characters, Azuma and Kaji, navigate their relationship. Particularly that there isn’t a need to define the relationship and there isn’t angst placed on the desire to have that be the case. I think this is done very subtly and actually in a particular queer way, compared to other bl stories which I’ve read and enjoyed. Actually, I might contrast this to Stay By My Side After the Rain, which I read recently and enjoyed quite a bit (made me cry a bunch!) in regards to the moment in volume 4 (?) where one character goes to his colleagues' wedding and his partner waits at home to surprise him with their own at-home informal wedding-like ceremony. It’s a moment that, well yes, made me cry, but I did also find a little corny, and not really in a good way lol.

Having a traditional wedding is not an urge that I myself am compelled by for a variety of reasons, most relevant being the fact that I don’t personally wish to engage in the hegemonic christian cultural event of getting married via having a wedding ceremony. And aside, it’s a heteronormative cultural “right of passage” that I am not keen to partake in, as a, what you might call, they/them lesbian. I don’t necessarily feel this way about marriage itself, and obviously I love when gay people get married lol, but um, I’ll be getting eloped in the woods and god will not be invited, thank you!

This is simply the perspective that I myself, as a white canadian lesbian (lol), am bringing into this, aware that the cultural practice of marriage in Japan is not a 1-1 comparison to how I personally understand it. As well, I understand the urge to want to get married, especially when you are not granted the right or privilege to legally do so. Additionally, there is the aspect to BL where the biases of the creators, who may or may not be queer themselves, are inevitably imbued into the stories that they write, which I won’t be getting into—just food for thought when thinking about this sort of thing, especially when so much modern (maybe 2015 onward, give or take) BL writes characters to be explicitly gay in what is meant to be a representation of Japanese society as it exists right now.

But all this to say, in Smokey Blue, when the characters explicitly express their lack of desire to get married, regardless of whether they could or not, but state their desire to remain together, it feels good to me. I like it. It’s an statement that to me, feels explicitly queer in relation to the relationship that Kaji and Azuma share and their lack of urgency to define that relationship with a title that would make it easy to explain to the society that they live in.

On intimacy versus the mundane:

Man this is really crazy, but look, I’m almost thirty (????), and as such, have increasingly aging parents. I found the depiction of what it’s like to have to become caretaker for, to worry about, to be bothered by and to feel guilty for being bothered by aging parents to be done really quite deftly without veering it all into melodrama. Man you’ve just gotta do it. You’ve gotta do it when it sucks, and you have to try not to get frustrated. There was a moment in the second volume when Azuma (and Kaji) go to take care of Azuma’s mother for a day, and during a private moment, Azuma notes how the stains on the bottom of the cups weren’t cleaned completely. It’s a single line among others, but it made me think of how the ring around the sink drain in my mothers bathroom isn’t kept as clean as it was in my childhood. Things like that. There’s a lot of musings about parents, but there are also a lot of musings about just, being an adult. Working, being depressed about working, changing your work and being overwhelmed about how much... well, work it is to change. There’s loss, there are new relationships; there’s exhaustion and grief. But the undercurrent of all of this is the mundanity of it. It’s life, it’s what happens, you can stop engaging it in but you can’t stop it from happening to you. I really really like the depiction of the mundane in Smokey Blue. It’s not feel-good and it’s not trying to be, it’s just honest about it.

What remains throughout that mundanity is our connections to people, and in Smokey Blue, the connection between Kaji and Azuma. They fit into each other’s lives with little resistance from either side, and continuously reach out to each other throughout the series. There are never any moments of denial or repression; neither ever reject the other (Kaji may make a snide remark, but yeah, he always goes in for the kiss, he never resists his desire). I saw someone say something about Kaji’s “patience” in regards to Azuma not expressing himself, which I found interesting because I don’t really find that that’s an aspect of their relationship at all. Maybe they’ll say “I love you,” verbatim, maybe they won’t—Kaji especially is more aloof verbally, but it’s the physical ways in which they continue to occupy space in each other’s lives that I think say enough for each of them. And not to say that there isn’t some pining, because there is, but it tends to get assuaged in a moment that makes both the reader and Azuma (who is the pov character) go “Oh Kaji is in love.”

vol 5 ch 25. dude are you seeing this shit. what words would you even need to say when sharing a gaze like that!

And, speaking of! They have sex a lot. And outside of what is does for the story (explicitly depicts the affection, care, and enjoyment they get out of each other and out of having sex with each other while continuing to not need to define their sexual/romantic relationship by terms,) I really like the way Hamada Kamome draws sex scenes lol. Like, a lot. I think she’s really good at illustrating the way that people clutch at each other and tuck their heads underneath each other’s chins to kiss their necks, etcetera!!! AND SHE LOVES DRAWING KISSING!!!!!!!!! MAKING OUT WITH TONGUE!!!!!!!!!!!! SHE GETS IT!!!!!!!!!

I learned something about myself this year that I had to figure out the hard way—through repeated disappointing experience. Each time, I would be brave and steel myself and remain optimistic. And I would try again. And then I would be disappointed again. Single volume bl where the story begins and ends in one volume… are not for me. In fact, I have a list of the ones I’ve tried and were let down by, which contains a plethora of titles that were lauded by my peers (strangers I follow on my locked twitter account) and that I was all too happy to give a chance, and then repeatedly continued to by left completely ambivalent about (or even annoyed by!). I think I kept trying because occasionally I do get got, and chose to remain hopeful that a moving or joyous experience could be repeated (ie Harada’s One Room Angel (ugh!!!!!!! wail!!!!!), or Basso’s Tonari Ni).

Now, I do understand that many readers who read and truly enjoy those single volume bl stories do so because uncomplicated stories about finding joy and happiness like, feel good to read. I’m not a hater—I think that the myriad of high school romances that begin and end in one volume where they deny their feelings at first, meet up in the classroom after school to kiss and then have sex when their parents aren’t home are valuable and worth existing purely because other people enjoy them, and because it’s a story someone wanted to tell and was able to.

And I also understand that many bl creators just simply don’t get the opportunity to publish stories longer than one volume, which genuinely makes me feel sad, because a lot of those stories deserve to be stretched out and elaborated on further and it would serve them to do so. By god I know I’ve read a ton of genre-fiction style single volume bl that are conceptually very compelling but had no room to stretch their legs and settle into their stories, (disappointing me!!!!) which is an honest shame. But again, being left unfulfilled time and time again has worn me out. I continue to see those recommendations, and now I bravely pass them by. Unless I’m feeling optimistic again (I can’t help it!) and I try again anyway. Whatever, right, it’s always worth a shot.

“Okay, what’s the point of all this then, Zoë?”

It’s Our Dining Table. The point of all of that was Our Dining Table.

Before it’s continuation in 2024, Mita Ori’s Our Dining Table was a single volume slice of life bl which began and ended in one volume. It’s not a particularly complicated story, but it’s feel-good. A rather chaste human drama about being lonely and unexpectedly sharing a meal with another person, which becomes an activity that spurs new joy into your life.

It makes me cry like a baby every single time I read it. Just now, I reread just the back third of it, and it made me cry so much that I need to blow my nose. Twice! What’s up with that, right?

Our Dining Table actually has a lot spinning parts in its human drama: both of the lead characters have some sort of interpersonal drama that fuels their various insecurities and rounds out their characterization in a way that feels natural to read, and end up playing out in a very heart-string tugging way. But that’s not why it makes me cry (well, is it a little bit but that’s not why it makes me clutch my chest and need to blow my nose twice). Dining Table affects me so strongly because of the way it portrays what it feels like to fall in love.

This is where this post gets less “I think this story is good!” and more “this story personally affected me in a specific way which others might not find relatable,” but that’s actually why I wanted to write it. Sorry to say, but I’m in a long term lesbian relationship with my girlfriend whom I met when we were both 23 and whom I fell in love with in a way that basically totally overwhelmed and frightened me, and the ways that those feelings (and all the other feelings that happen and continue to happen to you when you’re in love) are depicted in Our Dining Table feel so true to life that every single time I reread it it just makes me… verklempt!

It’s in the tiniest moments, like when Minoru makes udon for Yutaka, who hasn’t really been taken care of in that specific person you’re growing to love does something for you out of kindness way, and Yutaka watches his back as he’s laying in bed and he cries a little bit. Well, that is what it feels like. It does make you cry—thinking “Oh, this person wants to take care of me. And I want this person to take care of me.” (Made myself cry while writing count: 1)

vol. 1 ch. 3

It’s the moment after the confession scene in chapter 6 where Yutaka’s inner monologue says, “It’s like… learning a new way to use your heart.” I actually texted my girlfriend the moment I read that line for the first time in 2022 because we’d said something similar to each other, and seeing it in text like that made me go “Oh! That’s it exactly.”

And especially, especially, it’s in the climactic moments of volume one, where Yutaka ruminates throughout chapter 7 on how happy he is, being with Minoru, and how much having fallen in love completely and utterly scares him.

vol. 1 ch. 7

It’s scary, falling in love for the first time. It was for me, at least. You have this new and different happiness in your grasp, and you’re holding it so tight with both hands that your fingers ache with it. And without your control, your hands are remolding themselves to that new shape, and you just can’t help but think that if you lose it, your hands will be stuck like that—poised to clench but with nothing there to hold. For Yutaka, that concept of future potential loneliness and pain of loss feels like an obstacle he can’t break past. How can he allow the happiness of love to exist within him when there also exists that fear of loss? How can he shut out that fear?

He asks Minoru’s father, whose wife (and Minoru and his little brother, Tane’s mother) passed away two years prior to the beginning of Dining Table, how he dealt with that loss, and is told that, well, he hasn’t. He doesn’t ever expect to. Falling in love with someone means accepting the fact that you will lose them, in some way. You don’t banish that feeling of loss, you let it exist within you. Maybe it gets easier as time passes (it does), but it doesn’t go away. Obviously, this makes Yutaka burst into tears (I’ll save him some dignity and I won’t supply that panel—he’s just like me though, such a crybaby).

There’s a lot of moments in the continuation volume, Our Dining Table: Seconds, Please!: Yutaka getting all mushy when he gets drunk (me too dude), Yutaka saying “Sorry, I might not be very good at this,” before they have sex for the first time (me too dude!), Yutaka getting angry-jealous about Minoru’s ex knowing parts of Minoru that he isn’t yet privy to (I get it, seriously!!!), them staying up late and quietly expressing the pains of their past in the darkness while holding hands and then thanking each other for doing so (you know I’ve been there!!!!!!). Like, I could go on, but because this volume just came out, I don’t want to delve into too many details. Know that it continues to depict what, to me, it did feel like to fall in love, and what it feels like to be in love.

Both Yutaka and Minoru in Seconds, Please! are shy, brave, withhold their feelings for fear of freaking the other out, express their feelings in uncomfortable moments of vulnerability, and they try. They try for each other, even when it’s hard, even when it’s scary, and it makes them feel stupid and bad and shameful. They try because they want it to work; because being together feels good and it makes them happy. You’ve just got to try.

(Made myself cry while writing count: 2!)

I began and then very quickly finished reading The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window recently, which of course gave me One Million things to think about, and One Million things to want to write about. I kept a document as I was reading where I essentially took notes on what I was feeling and thinking about, which sat at 3000 words once I finished. This was before I even conceived of making this blog, but writing all my thoughts out long form did in fact, compel me into starting the blog. Anyway I’m going to start small and discuss just one moment from Tricornered Window here.

As always, when I finish a series, I like to seek out thoughts and opinions of other readers. Often, this is a mistake. In this case, while it was that, it also gave me a catalyst to write about an opinion I had which I was surprised to find differs from that of a handful of other readers. You finish Tricornered Window and you bemoan, “Where’s the kiss scene?” “Not even a hug?” “They didn’t even confess???” and I look at you, baffled, alarmed, disturbed, and confused. There was a confession scene. Right in the text, right in the climax of the manga. The confession was the climactic scene.

I’ll set the scene: Hiyakawa is established to be traumatised in a specific way that renders him unable to express or even understand his desires and feelings verbally. He doesn’t have the words to describe his feelings, because in a lot of ways, this period in his life (after having met Mikado) is the first time in his life that he has been given the space to experience these emotions. This idea of “not know something is until you know the word” comes up in chapter 24, where Hiyakawa is speaking to and about Mikado, though describing his own scenario as well—the inability to describe a flower as beautiful if you don’t know the words “flower” or “beautiful” , “not only will you not be able to see beauty, you can’t even see the flower”. Taking his meaning here, if you don’t know the word or the feeling of affection, or kindness, or, I’ll just say it, love, because you haven’t experienced it nor know what it feels like to give or receive, you can’t describe it. You can’t say “I love you.” You don’t know what you’re feeling, because you’re feeling it for the first time in your life, but you don’t know that.

vol 4 ch 24

Mukae says it himself in chapter 55, when asked what’s needed to pull Hiyakawa out, it’s not power: it’s love. The thing that Mukae determines is the one vital thing that Hiyakawa was deprived of as a child, the thing that he needs to be able to be tugged out of his hole. It makes Erika and Sakaki balk, but those two aren’t the ones who make a living out of seeing past the words that people say to get to the crux of their internal issues and tell them what they need to hear.

In the final moment of the climactic scene, in chapter 56, where Mikado is trying to pull Hiyakawa back up to him by making him put words to his feelings… he does. And the does the best he can. He does the best he can!!!! (I withhold an anguished wail here.)

“You still haven’t told me what you really want. Any words you can use are enough.”

He does. He puts what he wants into the words that he can say. “I just want you with me. I want you to let me be with you.”

I mean, I mean, guys (I begin pacing around the room with a frenetic energy) he doesn’t know the word love, but what he’s saying is that that’s what he wants. He wants love—I want you to be near me, with me, to love me, I want to be able to be with you, I want to be able to know love—he wants, he wants, he wants. He wants so much that for the first time in the entire series he’s able to honestly express the emotion he’s feeling, and for the first time since we meet him, and I presume since he escaped from the church, he cries.

vol 10 ch 56

It’s a confession of love! It’s exactly what Mikado wanted to hear Hiyakawa say! It’s not about whether he uses the word or not—to Mikado, he doesn’t need to.

And at the end of it all, that room in Hiyakawa’s heart isn’t filled with hate anymore—there are little motes of something else filling the inside of it, and when light shines on them you can see what they are.