My manga friend told me today this was the worst yaoi she’d ever read, and gave it 1/10 – so naturally, and very excitedly, I had to pull it from my shelf and read it immediately. I mean damn, that’s harsh, I’ve never even rated anything that low (not even Kingdom of Selfish Love, which is unfit even for toilet paper). Although I keep in mind that ratings are totally subjective opinions, I should also remember that most people don’t deliberately do the equivalent of yaoi dumpster diving, looking for the smelliest piles in the darkest corners and I’ve seen some shit. I’m going to have that faraway stare of a war veteran one of these days.
‘Grandma, why are you missing a leg?’
‘Oh sonny, back in the war, they dropped Studio Kosen titles on us, so many that we were slaughtered like cattle under a black rain of death, followed by Poison Cherry Drive for good measure which ate away our limbs and our will to live…’
‘Wow, how did you escape?’
‘I saw a glowing beam in the sky. It was the Incredible Kintaro himself, swinging his giant penis around the sky like Wonder Woman’s lasso, striking down the enemy with his thousand-pound titanium balls while yelling ‘Tofu Ball Choke!’ and shooting lasers out of his urethra.’
‘Grandma, you’re full of shit.’
‘Hey, respect your elders you little fuckhead.’
Cause of My Teacher is a book of seven one-shots and is no Kodansha Prize contender, but in my opinion it’s by no means the biggest cowpie in the field. It lacks both things this particular friend loves, which is story and non-stenciled backgrounds, so I can clearly see why it wasn’t her cup of tea. She also said it was very ‘paint-by-numbers,’ an assessment I agree with. But I didn’t hate it, it was just really average. BL is generally pretty formulaic by default, but I’m fine with that because ‘unique’ doesn’t always mean ’good,’ and vice-versa. Also, seven one-shots means seven sex scenes which is more than a lot of releases have. I can do this optimism thing sometimes! But actually, I think there is plenty of yaoi worse than this out there, if you search the ‘worst rated’ tag on this blog you can find some real toilet cloggers.
If you tend to like teacher stories, this book may seem like an obvious pick, but the reason why you like teacher stories matters here. If it’s because you like the relationship development, you’ll find more of that in a Pringles can so you can safely give this one a pass. If you like teacher ukes, the teacher was the seme in every pairing except one I think, so again you can safely pass. For me, the reason I tend to like them is a bit of a mix of ‘person in power losing control’ mixed with sex in work clothes and uniforms and/or megane, which is usually present in most teacher stories so I guess I’m an easy customer.
Although all the pairings involve a teacher, it’s not always a schoolteacher – we also have two ninja stories and a fantasy story here which collectively account for about half the book. My favorite of the historical stories was ‘Please, Young Master!’ but there was no particular reason why, I think it was just easier to follow because it only had two characters whereas the others had 3+ and no introduction and I couldn’t figure out who was who. Then again any semblance of ‘plot’ is fairly superfluous in all these stories so I just basically went ‘yeah whatever, just fuck now’ when I got lost and it’s almost like they heard me.
One of the stories features two characters from another one of Matsumoto’s works, ’Shinobu Kokoro,’ a ninja-themed BL which I have no yet read – although you won’t have had to read it to know what’s going on here. Spoiler: there’s these two ninjas, and they fuck.
The art is rough and looks unfinished and sketchy in parts, complete with lazy paneling and shading, but it manages to be serviceable. There are barely any backgrounds though as mentioned, stenciled or otherwise, so you don’t even know where the characters are half the time – they seem to be just floating or fucking in a void. Matsumoto is a competent artist who has the bishounen formula figured out, particularly for ukes – you may recognize her as the mangaka of Kyo Kara Maoh! though she did not write it – but she is phoning it in for this one with minimum effort. Possibly time constraints played a part, because this title was done around the same time as KKM so she was possibly working on both at once.
Another art-related thing that became annoying to me was the way Matsumoto drew blushing with these awkward looking lines that are too long and far apart, which I felt were distracting from the expressions.
I guess if nothing else, there’s variety here, moreso than you might expect from a teacher-specific title. How much you enjoy it in the end might depend on how much other yaoi you’ve read – if you’re a newbie fujo, said variety might be a carrot dangled just low enough to keep you from dwelling on its flaws, but if you’re an avid BL reader you’ll likely be bored and every aspect of this book will be something you’ve seen done better elsewhere. To me, that did not equate with it being unenjoyable because my standards are kinda low, but it kind of falls in this weird spot where I find it hard to recommend yet don’t think it deserves a ‘bad’ rating. If anyone else out there has read this one, I’d be curious what you thought!
TL;DR Formulaic and uninspired BL fare from the Kyo Kara Maoh! artist, the only thing this book really has going for it is that the characters are drawn attractively and also sometimes have sex with each other, though you don’t see much of anything. However, ‘attractive characters’ and ‘contains sex’ are pretty high up on my list of important boxes to check in yaoi and they alone can drive a yaoi past ‘bad,’ but the tank will run dry before getting to the ‘good’ mark. It’s just very average, ‘paint-by-numbers’ yaoi as my friend termed it. But if you enjoy teacher stories, it has a few bright spots and isn’t totally unenjoyable.