This was a random blind pick off my shelf, which is a great way to dig up forgotten surprises. Usually they’re subpar surprises consisting of light saber dicks wrapped in yaoi hands on a soft bed of bad cliches, but hey, you gotta sift the dirt to find the gold. I skimmed the back of this and saw the pairing is an idol and his manager, which didn’t really excite me because one kind of pairing I find annoying in yaoi is famous actor/author/entertainer/whatever with random dude who ‘sees the real him’ under his famous exterior. And this one definitely ticks that box.
I love older characters in general because I think having baggage and a past makes for a more interesting story with many more possibilities than ‘boy in high school’ provides. And DILFs in yaoi? Well, if you’ve read any of my other reviews you know how I feel about those (they’re summer days, baby – hot, and never enough of them). We’re introduced to Hisaya Amagi, unemployed and divorced with a daughter, who gets roped into working for his sister’s talent agency as the manager of a cool young idol named Koju.
Koju has alienated his past handlers for one reason or another, but he takes a liking to his much older manager right off the bat and becomes the pursuer, which I didn’t expect but I guess this is better than, uh…the opposite situation of a middle-aged guy pursuing someone half his age, although Koju doesn’t look that young which made the age gap less bothersome for me. The story moved much quicker than I was expecting and unfortunately either sped through or made irrelevant all the details I found the most interesting. Both characters had potential and some hints of their backstories that would have made their pairing make more sense, but because they just skimmed over all of this we don’t really get time to care or know more about who they are as people and their pairing ends up feeling forced. Hisaya wants to make sure that Koju’s feelings for him aren’t a result of his deep-seated daddy issues, and though the book tries to lead you to believe it isn’t, I didn’t end up being all that convinced.
There’s two female characters here, Koju’s obsessive young lover Rito and Hisaya’s overbearing company president boss of a sister who were both a lot of fun. Hisaya ends up being a good manager too despite his naivete about the business, since Koju’s attraction to him inspires him to be a better idol and all that predictable jazz.
They do get a little more into Hisaya’s past in the last 1/4th of the book which turned out to be one of the most interesting aspects of the story, but it felt too random and irrelevant and by then it’s a little too late for anything more to come of it. And it wasn’t like they were filling valuable story space with sex, cause there ain’t any buttfucking round these parts. In an M. Rated. Deux. Press. Title. Can you believe that shit? I expect these shenanigans from June, but Deux Press? The runner-up trash queens after Kitty Media? What makes it worse is that on the last page, they’re literally about to have sex, but then the story ends before it actually happens. We get like a two-page handjob scene earlier on but that’s all the sugar in this cereal, folks. Oh, unless you count Hisaya almost getting randomly raped in a park by his ex-boss. Damn, this dude must be farting an aphrodisiac or something.
The art is fine, not amazing but fairly standard for its time. Misasagi was mostly a yaoi artist and though I believe this is her only English-licensed title, probably her most notable work is on various adaptations of a BL visual novel called Kikuchi Megane, a psychological S&M-filled salaryman romp. She isn’t shy about her love of older men, a staple feature in her work. We’re on the same page here, sister – I do love DILFs as I mentioned, but I tend to prefer them paired with characters closer to their own age, or at least more relationship development than she gives us here. I was left feeling frustrated by how superficial it ended up being but I’ve definitely read worse.
TL;DR This fast-paced story about a young idol pursuing his middle-aged manager is a choppy and unsatisfying read due to all the most interesting details it introduces either becoming irrelevant, too quickly resolved, or introduced and then ignored. Not to mention, there’s no real relationship development between the main characters. Anything positive about it was totally negated by the fact that it’s rated M and there is no real sex, just making it overall frustrating even though it wasn’t terrible. The art was ok and the characters were fine, but a lot of surface-level intrigue was never explored.