Masafumi Tamura has had premonition dreams all his life that can predict illnesses, accidents, and deaths, but the strongest and most distatateful of these dreams that plagued him during middle school is one in which another boy lovingly fucks his asshole for hours on end. His first day of high school, the exact boy from his dream appears in one of his classes, setting Tamura off into an anxious spiral about his sexuality.
This boy is the fun-loving and energetic Narumi Seiwa, and Tamura quickly avoids him like the plague. Seiwa is confused by this and it only makes him more curious about why Tamura doesn’t like him. Eventually cornered, Tamura is force to confess the truth about his dreams to Seiwa, but Seiwa isn’t disgusted and repulsed as Tamura hoped he would – it’s just the opposite, with Seiwa’s passive interest in Tamura suddenly becoming very active and quickly turning romantic. Oh no, wasn’t becoming gay the very thing Tamura wanted to avoid? Sorry bud, you’re in a BL book, there was no avoiding it.
Something fun about this series was that Tamura’s family was more supporting of his homosexuality than he was, they were actually *encouraging* him to be gay since they knew about the dreams too. He does put up a sort of facade of resistance, but juxtaposed with all these sex dreams and it being a BL book and all, the odds were very much against him not getting fucked in the ass.
There wasn’t as gradual a lead-up to their relationship as I would have liked; once Seiwa hears about Tamura’s dreams he is basically instantly into him and just sort of gloms onto him and then I guess they’re dating.
The dream scenarios at were a pretty good appetizer, so I was looking forward to the IRL sex.
Oh yeah, about that IRL sex…
So Tamura finally agrees to let Seiwa pork him, and even goes through like three pages of explanation on how to have sex with a guy:
…ok, a nice educational reminder from one virgin to another. This should be a cute scene. we’re ready Zaou, lay it on us! It’s near the end of the book! Time for the cash and prizes!
….wait, did I miss something? They were about to fuck, and now it skips to the post-sex cleanup scene?
did she just….no…surely she didn’t cut out the sex scene, right?
Oh, but she did. I obviously don’t know Taishi Zaou, but that ain’t the tea, sis. She definitely just beat me up and stole my lunch money via manga. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, she puts this fucking page at the back of the book:
…in case you can’t read that, she announces she cut the sex scene out because “she was tired and the deadline was near.” She adds that she “might put it in as an extra if she feels like it,” but she doesn’t. She’s not the least bit apologetic either. This comes off sort of shitty, and honestly I don’t think I would have been so annoyed about it if her attitude wasn’t like this. Not only that, the scene is like, noticeably missing, there’s a bunch of lead-up to it that probably should have been cut too so that reader anticipation isn’t being built for nothing.
Also, despite apparently running out of time, this story has a long-ass afterward in which the characters are shown together years down the road and meet each other’s families. And there’s a weird sort of handjob scene:
It’s like, something I guess, and it’s nice to know they stay together. But the point is that she clearly had enough time to do a long afterward but somehow not enough time to draw the book’s only real sex scene? Like, for fuck’s sake, this is an M-rated yaoi book. I can’t believe her editor let her get away with that. Taishi, girl. I’m no mangaka, but let me tell you a secret. If a book only has one sex scene planned, that you already had about 10 pages of lead-up to, and you’re tired and it’s almost the deadline and you want to cut something out, cut something else out. Literally anything else. Cut out some plot, cut out some relationship development, cut out a pointless afterward, cut out the damn title pages and table of contents for all I care. Don’t. Cut. Out. The. Fucking. Sex. Scene. You’re a BL artist drawing an M-rated yaoi book! What do you think we buy this stuff for?
Ok, I’m done ranting to a total stranger who will never read this over a book they wrote like 15 years ago. But it was cathartic nonetheless.
So despite it ending on a really sour note for that reason, up until then it wasn’t that bad. The story was pretty silly and predictable but cute, there were little M-rated tidbits here and there and the art was attractive, but I couldn’t look past the big, smug “fuck you” to the readers she decided to pull.
Taishi Zaou is/was IRL friends with EikiEiki (most notable for Love Stage) and they collaborated occassionally. They’re both good artists and were DMP darlings back in the day with a handful of licensed titles each, but honestly from what I’ve read of theirs in English the two of them drive me nuts, what with Eiki not being able to reliably write endings and Zaou not being able to reliably write sex scenes (that makes me wonder if they are able to cover each other’s weaknesses in their collaborative works, but we don’t have any of those in English). Dokidoki put out a few more Zaou titles that I’ll be reading next so she gets a second chance; I’m going to hope this one was just a fluke.
TL;DR: Silly story with cute art about a high schooler who has constant “premonition sex dreams” about one of his classmates and tries to run away from his apparent fate of being gay and ending up with him. Despite some M-rated tidbits throughout the story showing parts of the “dreams” in question, there’s a lot of anticipation-building (including a multi-page gay sex ed 101) to the book’s only sex scene that ends up being completely cut from the story, which was very annoying. Taishi Zaou said at the back of the book that she did this because she was “tired” and it was close to the deadline. Uhhh yeah, maybe cut out something else? Like, anything else?