Yugi Yamada’s work echoes Fumi Yoshinaga’s – quiet and serious slice of life dramas and art that has a comfy vintage feel to it no matter when it was drawn – but her work never reached the same level as the great Yoshinaga, whose stories were usually more thought-provoking, unique, emotional, and mature. Still, Yamada was a prolific mangaka who was semi-popular in the late 90s and early 00s, has a lot of work in English, and carved out a niche of her own drawing realistic BL dramas. Don’t Blame Me definitely comes off as rough in places, but it’s mostly ok for being done in 2000 and I’ve read a lot worse.
The story opens with 13 yr old Makoto going to see a movie, and sees his cousin, Toshiaka Kaji, in the credits as assistant cameraman. He knew Kaji had always wanted to be a cameraman and decides to visit him to see how he is. Some of Kaji’s old friends from his school days show up and Makoto gets drawn into the peripheral of his cousin’s life, and his past. The story then shifts back in time 7 years ago to show Kaji’s college days and his adventures in the film club, and the adventures, hijinks, and heartbreaks of its members. This extended flashback makes up the bulk of the manga and doesn’t switch back to the present until the end. Kaji and virtually all of his film club male friends are gay, and the story focuses on a lot on his relationship with Iku, a character we only briefly met in the present.
Iku is a glasses-clad horror movie nerd who crushes on Kaji. He talks a lot about John Carpenter, whose movies I am also a big fan of ironically (especially “The Thing,” my favorite horror movie of all time) – although all his big hits came out before my time. I’m not sure whether JC’s movies were ever that big in Japan, but this book would have you think so.
We also see a blonde, fun-loving character named Kujirai a lot – the token fun, confident, slutty gay character who tries to hook up with everyone – and his various relationship dramas.
The story was fine I guess, the characters were ok but we only really truly get to know a few of them. The way it’s set up so that you’re looking at their past after first meeting them in the future, I wanted to know more about why they took the paths they did, particularly Kaji and Iku who are living together in the present – even Makoto notes that they seem like a weird couple and theyre rather unstable in the present, but we never learn why.
Makoto has a crush on his cousin Kaji since he’s so ‘sophisticated and worldly’ and says he’s someone who was always determined to be a cameraman, but he’s already very jaded about the job in the present, and seeing how he was in the past doesn’t really give us any sense about why he was so driven to do it in the first place – we see the first time he uses a camera, but we don’t really see him gaining a huge determination from that to do to want to do it for the rest of his life. Except for one slasher movie for the school festival, most of the stuff the club members actually end up filming is awkward emotional moments or physical scenes between each other, so it’s most often used to add a voyeur element to these interactions (also, instead of actually screening their slasher movie at the school festival, they accidentally screen a sex tape between Iku and Kaji instead – woops!). Meanwhile we get to know Iku quite well in the past and see big doses of his internal thoughts, but in the present he’s sort of sidelined.
There’s an additional story at the end between two college student characters named Kazuo and Tateishi, in which one makes the other a live-in slave. Tonally it’s very different from Don’t Blame Me, and consent is completely thrown out the window. It’s a weird way to end the book but if you didn’t get enough forced hand jobs by reading Our Kingdom, Yamada tops you off.
Still, there isnt too much here to warrant the M rating – there’s a few short sex or hand job scenes but they don’t show much, so don’t get too excited. I haven’t read much Yamada so i’m not sure if this is typical for her. She was pretty prolific throughout the late 90s-early 00s and helped inspire the BL stylistic traits of that era – especially the prominent lips, though she never got too crazy with it – but I’m personally not the biggest fan of her style. Her work definitely has emotional moments, but some panels look amateurish or sketchy and it’s often hard to tell whether this was intentional or whether she was still just figuring out her personal style still.
TL;DR A quiet slice of life drama that follows the relationships of members of a college film club. The characters are pretty standard yaoi archetypes and we only get more than a surface-level glance at a few of them, even though we meet them both in the present-day and then in a long extended flashback. There isn’t much sex for an M rating considering that most of what the film club actually makes are gay sex tapes between its members, and when there is, it’s short and not explicit – it is all fairly emotionally-charged and consensual though except for a side-story at the end. I’m not personally a fan of Yugi Yamada’s art style, and several panels are too roughly drawn for my taste. Very average BL fare all in all – there’s a lot better out there, but also a lot worse.