Every time I unearth a weird, perverse title lurking in my collection within a sweet and innocent-looking cover like this, it’s a little bit bittersweet because that’s one less one waiting to be discovered – and even though I regularly do add new titles to my collection, they’re usually recently-published ones, and modern BL that gets a physical release usually nowdays isn’t quite as – er – ‘special’ as this one.
As Many As There are Stars is an obscure and somewhat recent June release that isn’t pricey-rare, but I never see it in anyone’s collection. This book is very…actually I don’t even know what to call this. It’s just…weird. The art is weird. The tone is weird. The sex scenes are weird. The dialogue is weird. There’s a scene where one guy who has a ‘body fluid fetish’ gets off by licking between his partner’s dirty toes while sexually fantasizing about the salt/fat/grease content of the latter’s body, followed by very serious themes regarding suicidal ideation and parental abandonment, followed by cousin incest.
Oh yeah, and it’s rated 16+.
The story starts out with a boy named Ogikubo joining a club on his college campus. No one really knows what the club does, not even the members, but possibly it’s astronomy. The only interest they really seem to have in common is fucking men, so I guess it’s technically a gay club (zing). Ogikubo (the one to the far right below) is the only odd one out, and he is blissfully unaware.
The main pairing is the one on the cover, but their story is broken up in the first half by two other club member pairings that are both weird, forgettable, and fairly unattractive in my book, including one that has what the author refers to in the back of the book as a “body fluid fetish.”
Matsumoto’s art style is uhh… “unique” shall we say. I was not personally a fan of it; some scenes were good but others were borderline OEL-level. It would have been fine for 4-komas or something, but in a full-length manga it was somewhat lifeless – it didn’t lend much emotion to either the story or the sex, and felt like a mismatch for the serious tone and darker themes. In fact, most of the sex was just slightly more erotic than an appliance how-to manual, and it certainly didn’t help that they frequently brought up topics like death and violence while balls deep in each other.
Speaking of being balls deep in each other, it is worth noting that this manga is rated 16+ even though there is a decent amount of sex. I mean, I’ve read June titles where there’s about as much sex and visible genitals as an Amish knitting circle and they give it an M-rating, so this was surprising. This was published by June in 2016 even though it was written in 2009, and so the only thing I can think of is that ratings guidelines had relaxed by then in some way. I guess Karens stopped being shell-shocked by gay relationships and found some other petty BS to complain about, like transgender bathrooms.
Perhaps the most normal thing about it was the story, which was actually decent. It was serious, mature, angsty, and interesting, and if anything I think there should have been less sex scenes (yes I really did just type that, probably never again) because if they weren’t having sex that was weird or for weird reasons, they were having too-serious conversations or internal thoughts during it, which killed the mood a bit. The plot mainly focuses around Kousuke Ueno – the black-haired one on the cover – and his backstory, but the first half explores some of the other characters too, all of whom I found to be less interesting. But it also featured dialogue about things like being strangled while fucking and oral sex in front of your grandparents, so…win? There is also cousin incest in here, but with everything else in here this shouldn’t be that surprising.
I did not find any of the characters hot, which was the main reason I couldn’t get into this book – I have a fairly high tolerance for weird shit in yaoi, but the characters have to look sexy. One had closed, droopy eyes the whole time which made him look like he just walked out of Willie Nelson’s tour bus, and Ueno basically looked like a girl and I personally am not into the ultra-fem look in yaoi. I realize the attractiveness of the characters is largely subjective though, so this is more of an opinion. One of the characters talks oddly too; I’m not sure how it was in Japanese and if they were supposed to have some kind of regional dialect like a Kansai-ben but they translated it as like a redneck accent which was pretty annoying to read.
On my journey to know about, own, or read every BL with a physical English release – especially the older ones – it’s the obscure and weird ones (like this one) or cursed ones that is the reason I started this blog. I want to bring you bizarre or forgotten shit that no one ever talks about, that is possibly terrible, possibly amazing, or some combination of the two. But to be honest, I can’t even figure out where As Many As There Are Stars falls on the spectrum. I didn’t really like it personally but most of my gripes about it are fairly subjective and it’s not like it has glaring plot issues, awful anatomy, or is hard to follow. I can see people enjoying it much more than me, especially if they like the art style.
TL;DR Much like I’m sure I would feel about any manga that features sexual licking of dirty toes, cousin incest, and suicidal ideation drawn in a cutesy style, I am a bit weirded out by much of what is going on in here. The story was surprisingly decent and I liked the serious psychological tones and darker themes in the second half, but there were bizarre or perverse undertones that made most of the sex weird or not very hot. The art style is unconventional which is a nice change, but I personally did not find any of the characters attractive which was the primary reason I did not really like it, but people who like characters that fall outside of the conventional bishonen may disagree. Just don’t expect to get turned on.