Do you like 12 year olds topping their high school stepbrothers? No? Well too bad, says Taishi Zaou, you thought you were just getting a story about a guy with sexy hands but then POW, surprise shota semes. Thankfully everyone having sex is here is past puberty, if that makes you feel better.
This is Taishi Zaou (Mikiyo Tsuda)’s debut BL, and features four lovely tales of gay romance where definitely no one is 12 years old. The title story is about high schooler Fujino who realizes he has a hand fetish – specifically, for his glasses-wearing classmate Takie. Whenever Takie touches him, Fujino gets turned on. If you’re familiar with Zaou’s work, you’ll know she loves gimmicky premises like this.
After some hemming and hawing Fujino eventually lets Takie know about his strange fetish and conveniently, Takie also likes Fujino as well. Takie takes the lead and then they have some fairly non-M-rated sexy times.
Not a bad first BL, and she can reliably draw cute guys, although the art does show it’s age. The story was pretty boring – really safe, predictable, and average. As I mentioned before, she tends to create stories around a comedic gimmick like this, but then never really does much with the idea. She could have done a lot more with the hand fetish thing and put Fujino and Takie in some funny situations involving Takie innocently touching Fujino and him trying not to let on that he’s turned on – like maybe they’re partners in the sports festival or something and have to do some tag team race and Fujino gets injured and Takie has to massage his sore muscles or bandage an injury or something. I don’t know, just situations with touch opportunities – it was too serious and needed some more comedy.
The next four stories are all shorter. The second one, “Brother Battle” is about high schooler Tomoharu and his two new stepbrothers, one his age named Yuki and one who’s 12 named Aki. Oh, you thought he was going to get with the one who is his age? Yeah so did I…
To be fair, it is not really Tomoharu’s fault. Yuki sexually harasses Tomoharu one night and it sends him into Aki’s room, where – turns out – Aki has no less interest in sexually harassing him, once he finds out what that means.
Thankfully, they don’t actually get it on, just kiss. It was cute I guess if you aren’t bothered by the age gap, since Aki was more just intensely curious and Tomoharu in no way tried to take advantage of him.
In case you didn’t get enough aggressive 12 year old stepbrother lovin’, the next story “Love Play” has an almost identical sort of age situation with characters who even look the same – the kid in this story is Kairi, is a rich brat who aggressively goes after the object of his affection, high schooler Takami.
This story doesn’t have much of ending, Kairi sort of continues to shove his feelings on Takami and then tries to be all like “but it’s because I care about you” and Takami is all like “dude, we’re both guys and we’re four years apart and you’re like a child” and then Kairi is like “oh ok, we’re dating now right?” and then it ends. You see kids, shota can get licensed in the west, as long as there’s no sex!
There’s a bit of an intermission here and Zaou mentions that she mainly did these two stories simply because you wouldn’t expect the younger kid to be the one taking the lead, so I guess I can appreciate that in a genre saturated with the same familiar tropes all the time. She then announces that her editor made her put “lots of sex” in the last story. I sort of don’t blame her editor since Zaou for some reason wanted to draw BL while also seemingly drawing every sex scene against her will, a pattern that becomes clearer in her later work.
So of course I was excited to see this last one. She even said she got it sent back the first time because it wasn’t censored enough Smutfest, here we come! The fourth story features two high schoolers, and here is all the sex in it right here:
…wait, where’s the rest? Is this book missing pages? Well, clearly I have a different idea on what constitutes “lots of sex” than Taishi Zaou does, but I guess it’s enough to hang an M rating on. If I’m being honest I didn’t care what was going on in this story at all, it was an extremely basic sort of high school crush thing without a lot going on except weak sex scenes. I’m also not sure what was so dirty here that it had to be censored more…maybe the dick in the upper right on that second image? It ‘s funny how she can whip out (!) something explicit like that but then just have an invisi-dick hand job on the facing page. Sorry, only one dick per spread, folks.
Her work tends to have a lot of extras in the form of writeups or explanations about each story, random stuff going on in her life, or little mini comics. This was definitely my favorite:
Nothing like thinking about gay sex at your grandpa’s funeral! I clearly underestimated her commitment to the genre…
TL;DR: Taishi Zaou tends to like silly or gimmicky premises like in this title story of a guy with a hand fetish, but she never does much with the idea and the story is too serious when it should have clearly been a comedy. Not a bad BL debut, but ends up being pretty boring…her art is never terrible at least. Two of the four stories feature a 12 year old seme with a high school uke, and in one they’re stepbrothers, so it’s almost a relief that there isn’t really any sex in here….and anytime a hand touches a dick or an ass it’s so censored it looks like someone making shadow puppets. Oh, but she tells you about how she was thinking about gay sex at her grandpa’s funeral, so I feel like I have to salute her commitment to the genre.