Library sales are pretty unexpected places to find M-rated yaoi. If they have a manga section at all, much less one that has anything other than dog-eared copies of Naruto and Dragonball Z, they’d probably never (knowingly) put BL in it, because the last thing any parent wants is their 9-year-old finding a volume of Level C while were just innocently ogling the covers of Love Hina and running up to them loudly asking what a creampie is or why a man would want to stick his pee-pee in your butt. But lo and behold, I unearthed this puppy at a library sale one time, the only yaoi book I have found at one to date. It even still had the bonus postcard intact which was pretty cool. Made me wonder how it ended up there and who it used to belong to. I’ll bet it was a member of Congress. I like to think my state representative is secretly a fudanshi, it’s about time someone stood up for the most important issues of our time, like needless censoring.
L’Etoile Solitaire is the debut story of Yuno Ogami, and possibly her only published work unless she has a pseudonym – she’s somewhat of a ghost, and seems to have all but disappeared from the manga world. Her website/blog is still up but hasn’t been updated in years, and interestingly still has a post up from this book’s launch where she did a custom illustration of the main characters for her readers. This story was a ‘Japanese Original English Language’ manga, a term which makes zero sense to me but apparently just means it was commissioned. Since we now know it was the only real story she ever did, we have nothing to really compare it to nor could witness an evolution in her style, sadly. I wish she hadn’t dropped off the map after this because she was talented, and I think she was would have become a really great mangaka.
First off, I think reviews of this book from when it came out were unduly harsh (especially for a yaoi title), with the art being criticized as amateur and the story ‘formulaic,’ two things which could honestly apply to probably 1/3 of June’s entire 300+ title catalog. I hope it wasn’t these lukewarm reviews that dissuaded Ogami from drawing any more. Yes the art is pretty rough in places, but the characters always have beautiful, attractive faces which I think is the important part in BL, and plenty of licensed yaoi is full of awkward proportions and anatomy. Yes the story is a bit predictable, but what yaoi story isn’t? Every single one of them pretty much ends the same way, with the main couple falling in love and being together in the end, unless I’m missing some other big essential element of romance plots. I felt the story was pretty solid, actually, and I disagreed pretty strongly with other reviews on that point – it was very romantic, beautiful, well-paced, and had a few twists I didn’t expect. This was an early June release, and thanks to the benefit of hindsight we now know that they not only definitely put out worse titles, but also a lot which are pretty much on this same level as this one and got much better reviews. So it’s kind of an enigma to me that critics were so hard on this particular title. Maybe it’s just differences in taste. In general, most yaoi is perfectly enjoyable to me without it reinventing the wheel. Hot bishies having sex? Check. A plot? Hey, sometimes that’s superfluous.
I’m going on a tangent again soooo back to the book itself – ‘l’etoile solitaire’ is French for ‘the lonely star*, and is the name of the café where our two lovebirds run into each other for the first time. Micah is an American hotel baron in the middle of aggressively expanding, and has his sights set on buying out a small and struggling hotel chain in Japan. Upon arriving in the country to do just that, little does he know that the nice young man he met and chatted with in a quiet cafe to escape the rain was Yuuki, the young president and heir of the Kurahashi hotel – the exact one he was planning to take over.
*I looked that shit up so that you don’t have to
I thought this was a great premise and had some good suspense at the beginning, and my only real gripe with the story was that they switched gears from this strong setup and wandered away from it for no discernible reason (perhaps the one point mentioned in some other reviews that I felt was valid). But the plot still progressed well – I really felt attached to Micah and Yuuki and the build of their feelings for each other was exciting. It was a slow and steady burn and their romance was infectious, but more importantly it was believable. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of yaoi where it seems the main couple meets and says the L word on facing pages. L’Etoile Solitaire rewards the patient reader.
I loved this climactic full-page panel where Yuuki and Micah have just realized their mutual feelings. It has so much emotion, and I think anyone who has ever been in love can relate to the pure joy of that moment when you realize your feelings are returned. Ogami captured it nicely.
But not everything’s rosy for our lovers here – Micah’s about to marry his wealthy heiress fiance, plus his nosy assistant Richard will do anything in his power to keep his boss from getting distracted from work. The story has a Romeo-and-Juliet, star-crossed-lover feel to it, and is very charming, sensual, and enjoyable to read. It’s easy to get emotionally involved with the characters and root for them the whole time – they have an energy between them that seems to draw them together. The storytelling elements are strong and I think this would have made a good OVA. One thing I liked about the relationship between the characters was that the much-younger Yuuki was more or less on Micah’s playing field, which made it much more authentic to me – I hate when these strong, powerful, rich semes chase after some broke school boy or street kid, I never buy it. Rich men sweeping poor girls/boys off their feet to live happily ever after with doesn’t really happen in real life, only Lifetime movies and Harlequin novels. I don’t know, maybe it’s just a pet peeve but I never like that premise in yaoi books if it takes itself too seriously. So bonus points for not doing that I guess.
The art was indeed a bit rough – I won’t argue with that – and full of yaoi hands and awkward proportions. However, this is kind of a feature of yaoi (especially older books) that for some reason mangakas have been allowed to get away with, and I don’t think it’s fair to single this book out.
Often times if the men are attractive and the story sexy, many readers will turn a blind eye to those kind of drawing issues. It is one of those things that I think does perhaps separate good yaoi from great yaoi, but often it won’t bring a book down a peg for me as long as the characters’ faces are hot and their expressions are good. Exaggerated proportions are a staple of comics and manga in general after all, so this can be somewhat a matter of taste. Micah and Yuuki are both gorgeous in pretty much every panel and I liked Ogami’s style; her proportions and such could be (have been?) developed with practice – her foreshortening and placement of the head and neck was noticeably off in parts. When I draw faces I personally struggle with this exact same thing so maybe I’m just being a bit sympathetic. You can tell she’s talented and spent a lot of time on this book, and I think it showed.
The intimate scenes were censored quite a bit, but still erotic. I think for this story in particular, showing too much might even have been too jarring, it kind of reflected Yuuki’s shyness and trepidation in a way- sometimes having your imagination fill in the naughty bits can be equally as titillating.
There is one thing that every review of this story failed to mention that I feel definitely needs mentioning, and that is a bonus story that features Yuuki laying on a bar with a lime in his mouth and Micah licking tequila off his stomach. I don’t know about other people, but in MY reviews, such things don’t go unmentioned. TheBL: classy AND informative!
Overall, this title was fairly enjoyable and I thought the good outweighed the bad. There was something special about it that I couldn’t put my finger on – passion, maybe. It was passionate in every way, on every page, and that translated to me. You could feel the characters’ emotions really strongly, sense their love and drama and disappointments in a visceral way. You can learn to draw anatomy, you can learn about perspectives and foreshortening, you can learn about panel composition and proportions. But you can’t learn to draw passion. Then, just like a ‘l’etoile solitaire’ Ogami just faded from the manga world. Makes me sad.
‘Hey X, do you want some butter with that corniness?’ Don’t worry, I’m not going to start ending reviews with that kind of sap, I’m just drunk and it’s 4 am.
(TL;DR): L’Etoile Solitaire is the lone work of mangaka Yuno Ogami, who shortly thereafter seems to have pretty much disappeared from the manga world, sadly. Though critics were kinda harsh on it when it came out, I felt it was solid for a debut, which I am taking into account when rating it. The story was romantic, the boys beautiful, the sex sensual – it was passionate, and the characters’ emotions translated really strongly to me. The good parts were very good, and did a lot to outshine the noticeable drawing issues and drifting of the plot from a strong beginning (but there’s tequila body shots at the end so, you know, it comes full circle I guess.)