It’s been a while since I read a Nastumizu title – Love Bus Stop – but this one is similar in a lot of ways; the most important one being that it features mostly older men having sex in button-up shirts. All aboard the hot salarymen fucktrain lfg
This first story has a weird premise that never really made much sense. Rich guy Keiichiro’s ex-bf comes crawling back to him asking for a loan, but out of a need for revenge on the guy who dumped him K makes a bet that he’ll lend him money if he left 5 million yen in the park with ‘spend freely’ written on it and someone turned it in…and if no one turned it in, he wouldn’t lend his ex anything. This made fuck all sense unless you realize that there’s a missing piece of info you’re supposed to just infer I guess, which is that the specific bag of money that was part of the bet would be the same money used for the loan. This doesn’t register at the beginning because we never knew how much the ex-bf asked for, he just asks for “money,” and K seems to just pull the 5 million yen figure out of thin air when he suggests the bet. The book does a pretty shit job of explaining it, even the back summary doesn’t connect the bag of bet money and the loan money as being like, one single non-replicable object.
Anyway, shitty-setup-explanation aside, a young man named Otowa picks the money up and explains to Keiichiro the pretending-to-be-a-passerby-stranger that he knows he should turn it in but desperately needs to pay back a debt with it. The spiteful Keiichiro is of course desperate to see someone spend the money so his ex doesnt win the bet and get it, and ends up following Otawa to his debt collector in Kyoto, a rich business owner named Yukihara, where he learns the whole story. This ends up with…*shuffles BL plot cards*…Otawa putting on bunny ears and working in a cosplay club.
Oh, and also he and Keiichiro fuck on top of a pile of money.
This plot was definitely a little janky and needlessly complex for like only half of a BL book but…well, two cute salarymen end up fucking I guess and one learns an Aesop about revenge, so don’t forget to tell your parents what you learned today.
The second story is about Yuki, the businessman from the first story, a playboy who is also gay…nice, I like when a book doesn’t waste any characters on heterosexuality. Yuki’s faithful servant Sei who grew up in Yuki’s family’s household has always had feelings for Yuki, but could never say. Yuki is in the same situation and also never made his feelings known, afraid to force Sei into something against his will as his ‘boss.’
But Yuki can’t hold his love (or his dick) back anymore and things get heated fast when they both realize their feelings are mutual. They also have a great sex scene where Sei gets his hands tied with his own tie while getting fuckled (this was a typo but the word fuckled sounds funny so I left it). The author wrote in the afterward of Love Bus Stop that she fantasized about this exact scenario so well, glad she found a way to work it into another work I guess.
Last is two much shorter high school pairing stories that I could take or leave. In one of these the characters look pretty much exactly the same as the Yuki x Sei story which seemed a little lazy.
I really enjoy semi-clothed sex scenes and she seems to as well, as almost every pairing features a sex scene with their clothes or pants either off or half off. I’ve explained in other reviews why I seem to like this so much but I think it’s because I like the interplay between the control and loss of it, and what’s revealed and what’s not. The “fuck I’m so horny I don’t even have time to take my clothes off to fuck you” thing is just, idk, it’s hot for some reason! *chef’s kiss*
Her art has a bit of a vintage feel to it, but I can’t put my finger on what era – 70s maybe? It’s charming though, and even though the main story is a little weird it isn’t awful and the first two pairings are cute. Overall a decent title and if you liked this one you should check out Love Bus Stop also by her.
TL;DR Similar to Natsumizu’s other June work Love Bus Stop, this features serious one-shots with mostly adult characters having mostly semi-clothed sex, a combo I like. Her art has a bit of a nostalgic feel and there’s a good amount of sex scenes in various positions which is great, although I could take or leave the stories and none really grabbed me.