Note: The crying-to-sex ratio is about 20:1 in this book, which I just feel like should be stated upfront.
So, I usually don’t read a lot of shounen-ai – somehow I skipped over that stage and went straight to the smut, and find it hard to regress now. ‘What, no cupping invisible shafts? How will I get to the end?” (No pun intended) The lengths I go to on my quest to read every yaoi manga (Totally realistic goal, right?)
It actually did take me ages to finish this one, it kind of dragged at the beginning but picked up a bit at the end (but I mean at least it DID have an end unlike a certain other Eiki book…*cough art of loving cough*) Really if you were to summarize the plot in words, not a whole lot actually happens. The story was easy enough to follow and might best be described as ‘angsty fluff,’ but I’m not sure how well those elements mixed here. I like angst, but I found it hard to connect with Daigo or feel much for him or the characters’ relationship at all actually, and emotionally he was much more a uke…I mean, he is crying in almost every single panel to the point where it lost impact. He was also drawn inconsistently and in some panels looked like a much different character…if the way Eiki drew his portrait in the Afterword was how she drew him in the rest of the story, I think I would have liked the book a lot more as a whole (maybe that wouldn’t matter to some people but for me to really get into a shounen-ai either the story has to be amazing or both boys have to look really super hot …bonus if both are true). But Hirofumi was a cutie for sure though, and surprisingly funny at times. The art was a bit stiff and definitely secondary to her work in the Art of Loving, in which she both draws very cute characters and develops them compellingly to boot (though I’m highly annoyed she never finished that story). For her debut manga though, Dear Myself was not bad at all, she had some interesting ideas and themes going on in here – to me the best scene hands down was the one that involved the psychological conversation between Hirofumi’s selves (best I can describe it without spoilers), I wish she has incorporated that concept more.
One reviewer on Amazon (the reviews for this book are completely across the board there by the way), noted that they didn’t like the very end that shows the characters three years later, I actually liked this bit (especially how Daigo turns out) and it added a hint of character development which I found a bit lacking from the main story. It would make me interested to read the sequel if it continued along those same lines – I know there is technically a second part (World’s End I think it’s called?) but don’t know how much of a true sequel it really is.
Overall, this is a title that will yield different opinions from different people – some will like it and some will hate it but I don’t think it’s exactly polarizing, there are some like me who just don’t have strong feelings about it either way and think it’s in the middle of the pack somewhere. You’ll just have to read it to see where your thoughts fall on the spectrum!
(TL;DR): This likely would have been a better title back in the day when there was there was less BL to compare it to, it isn’t really bad but it sort of pales in comparison to modern BL. No shafts in sight, but there’s a big ol’ bucket of angst for those who like that. EikiEiki seems to hate writing endings, so I was just glad that this actually had one.