Boy I sure do love when a book leads up to an ending that would tie everything together but instead they go ‘sike, you thought this was going to have the ending the reader wants? Girl do you even read bad yaoi?’ Well golly gee, guess I have egg on my face for being hopeful…
The first half of this book is a story about a man named Mitsuha visiting a town where he used to live, and ends up crashing in a room above his friend’s bar for a few days with one of the bar’s employees, a young boy named Nana (meaning ‘no one’) because he has amnesia and can’t remember his name. I hate convenient amnesia as a plot device so this was eye-rolling to me, but they don’t rely on it at least. Nana reminds Mitsuha of his long-lost brother, Nanao, and takes a liking to him. Mitsuha and Nanao were separated in a foster home as children and the records were lost in a fire, and so Mitsuha has been looking for Nanao ever since.
Nana has some obvious but unspecified trauma so perhaps it’s best he has amnesia. He sleeps around with other guys in the neighborhood and the book’s single sex scene is him basically being raped by one of them, which was annoying – like, “oh, there’s a sex scene in this 16+ title! Except it’s…rape with a random guy.” It turns out to be just one of many questionable decisions in this book. Anyway, Mitsuha has taken a liking to cuddling with Nana in bed in their shared room, and they slowly fall for each other.
Whether or not Nana is actually his lost brother in this story isn’t actually super clear until later in the book, so at the end you’re left feeling like ‘uhh, wait is this incest?’
If you’d consider it a spoiler whether or not Nana is Nanao, stop reading now if you’re interesting in reading this one and don’t want to know, as I can’t talk more about the story without that reveal. If you don’t care, read on!
The second half opens with another character named Nana, and this turns out to be Mitsuha’s long-lost Nanao. He was adopted around age 5 and has a younger stepbrother named Hiromu, the focus of the second story – so it becomes clear that no, the Nana in the first story is not Nanao. This was a bit of a relief if you’re not particularly into blood brother incest which I’m guessing is the majority of people.
I actually had to skim this story 2-3 times to get it because the first time I read it I had the characters completely mixed-up, and there’s two reasons for this. The first is that the preceding story primes you to think that the Nana in this story looks like the Nana from the first story, so I was thinking light-haired Hiromu was Nanao. The second reason is that this story is more about Hiromu than it is about Nanao and told from the former’s perspective, so me thinking that Hiromu was Nanao fit my expectation that this story would be more about him. The second story in ‘Paradise on the Hill,” the other Tenzen work we have in English, was also very confusing so I think maybe Tenzen could use some improvement in layouts and dialogue to help the reader follow a story’s flow and details. It is also a very real possibility that I’m just completely stupid.
Nanao knows he’s adopted but Hiromu evidently doesn’t, but once Hiromu finds out I guess this gives him the green light to let his feelings be known since they aren’t blood-related. Not that being actual brothers would be a deterrent for that in Yaoi World, where even son-dad incest isn’t off the table. There’s your risky click of the day.
There’s some other details in this story that are never really followed up on, like Nanao reading a book of essays by Mitsuha and it never being mentioned anywhere in the first story that Mitsuha was a writer. This also leads to the presumption that Nanao knows who Mitsuha is. There’s another scene where Hiromu goes to the foster home to look for more info on Nanao, echoing a scene in the first story where Mitsuha goes there to look for info on Nanao too. With all this build-up you would think that Mitsuha and Nanao finally reunite at the end. Get ready for a great surprise! No, they do not. They simply each have an ending with their lovers. What the hell, Tenzen? Suffice it to say I was not happy about this and feel like the ball was dropped so far it’s wedged in the earth’s inner core now. Seriously, why even bother to have two linked stories with a plot of two brothers being separated and looking for each other if you’re never going to have them meet at the end? Really felt like a huge waste.
Though there was a bit of inconsistency in how the characters were drawn, this book displayed an overall noticeable improvement in her art compared to ‘Paradise on the Hill.’ She still loves those pointy faces but it looks a bit less weird on these younger characters, who were not only more attractive thanks to more balanced features but also more interesting. Despite my qualms and annoyances with the story, it’s enough to make you care, at least there was an attempt at actual plot and character development here…attempt being the keyword.
TL;DR: Well…an attempt was made. This book consists of two linked stories about two brothers split up as kids finding love amidst their search to find each other, and both plots lead up to a point where they should absolutely converge at the end- but suffice it to say all of the book’s build-up was wasted and leads nowhere but disappointment. The art is slightly better than her earlier English title ‘Paradise on the Hill,” helped by the fact that younger characters look marginally less bad with Dorito chins. Overall this is definitely one to skip though.