uh oh here we go

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, 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.

Ai da nante Iwanai kara is a story where our main character, Touji, and his best friend almost lover but not quite in high school, 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 functional stranger, Kiyoto, in a desperate and misguided attempt to find out if he could have fallen in love with Yachiyo 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 presence back 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 versus 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 asked a sleepy Touji if he ever wanted to reunite with Yachiyo, to which Touji said, “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, 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 undescribable 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 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 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 farther 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, depicts him expressing that he wants Touji’s love wholly, he doesn’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 human interaction. Higure immediately de-prioritises Kiyoto’s place in Touji’s life and even Kiyoto’s own place in the story thus far—he’s not 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 does not show up a single time after the break-up scene, he is 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 rewards 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 this character's load-bearing choices 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. 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.

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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 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.

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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.