This story exists in a reality where if you’re an attractive young man, every single rich old man wants to have sex with you. This is also a completely normally occurrence to close business deals. Uhh, alrighty then! Let’s dive into the world of Hollywo-*cough* Hot Limit!
Kazuma is a bored college student who works at a bar at night for extra money, where a beautiful, slutty, aggressive boy named Maya often makes an appearance. Kazuma later gets another part-time job in a local mansion, where he meets the family’s polite young son, Shinya – whom the surprised Kazuma recognizes right away as Maya. Turns out he has a Jekyll and Hyde personality – he’s the obedient attentive schoolboy Shinya by day, and the horny sex demon Maya by night.
While working at the mansion, Kazuma becomes aware of a local politician named Tanabe who stops by a lot to see – and sleep with – Shinya, and also finds out that Tanabe is pimping Shinya out for sex with old men to close business and political deals. Kazuma confronts Shinya about this, who claims Tanabe just makes his body hot and horny and he can’t control himself.
Kazuma eventually confesses to Shinya that he loves him, and tries to untangle him from Tanabe’s influence. But things heat up when Tanabe begins to groom Kazuma’s younger brother Hisashi for sex work, and also tries to help drive Kazuma’s family’s hotel out of business so a bank he works with can buy it up. It’s up to Kazuma to save both Shinya and Hisashi, drive Tanabe away for good, and win his lover’s heart.
There is more ‘story’ at least going on here than most BL, likely because the story had a separate writer. A lot of key story points sort of collapse under scrutiny though. Like, why would Tanabe have to hypnotize and blackmail young boys into prostitution with old rich men when you could just pay a willing prostitute to do that for you? Also, Shinya lives at home, what rich parents would let a skeevy weird middle-aged politican just casually hang around their house with their college-aged kid and be alone with him in his bedroom?
The biggest question mark though was the reason behind Shinya seemingly flipping a switch to become Maya, and the book doesn’t seem to know the answer either. It’s hinted that it’s “horny hypnotic suggestion” which is sort of ridiculous. (“Honey, I didn’t mean to cheat, it was sexual hypnotic suggestion!”) But it also hints it’s just Shinya’s repressed sexuality coming out to play, and he wanted to do it, and so just went along with what Tanabe wanted..it’s never really clear. Kazuma is a total white knight character all gung ho about saving his prostitute princess, and just assumes Maya is the imposter personality.
The ending definitely crumbled a bit as well. There’s a sort of showdown at Tanabe’s house with all the characters, but he never has to face justice, which is annoying. The subplot with Kazuma’s family’s hotel is confusing and there was like some drama with a bank and land development that never really gets resolved. It was totally unnecessary for the BL part of the story so whatever….honestly the book had more story than it really needed, and could have cut like 1/4th out.
There’s definitely some sex though, and the scenes aren’t terrible, so that’s a nice plus I’m not really a fan of Kanbe’s art, it’s a little stiff (zing) and I don’t like her sex facial expressions which feel copy and pasted…but for mid 00s yaoi it’s whatever I guess, I’ve seen worse.
So I guess overall if you’re not bothered by below average mid 00s art it isn’t terrible. It has actual sex and it has an actual story, and that alone puts it at least in the middle of the pack somewhere. I probably wouldn’t read it again though.
TL;DR: Well, there’s an actual story and there’s actual sex scenes and…not the worst art I’ve ever seen I guess, but some of the sex is dub-con and a big chunk of the story is about forced prostitution which would turn some people off. It does have a happy ending but there’s some, uh, “being sexually hypnotized into screwing rich old men for money” along the way.