Aoi Kujyou is something of an uncommon anomaly in the yaoi world – a male. You would never know this, as his art style and stories are very much the same as his female counterparts, but it’s interesting when a male artist chooses to make BL for a female audience. I think it’s safe to say his work is a collective ace in the pocket for wooing girls *or* gay guys, so this dude is really straddling the strait here and his friends are probably all jealous at the power he wields. He’s still an active mangaka now and has quite the back catalog too. As far as this early work of his goes though, it was a bit of a dud for me overall due to some missing context and no clear plot development. There’s some prrrrrretty dang hot kissing though. Gay kissing. Shh don’t tell my mom.
It stars 25yo office worker Kataoka and his longtime school friend Izumi, his on-and-off fuck buddy he’s known since school who he yearns for a relationship with. Kataoka is responsible and even-keeled while Izumi is carefree, chaotic, somewhat slutty, and hard to tie down. I tend to like older characters in BL and this book has no sidestories so you’d think this would be a slow-burn with tons of time for relationship development, but this wasn’t the case. It’s basically like a series of short stories about the couple, and with a few exceptions the order doesn’t seem to matter. They get together early in the story and then it kinda just shows snapshots of their relationship. This wasn’t exactly a negative, but there was missing backstory and context to several obviously important elements.
There’s just something *off* about this story, it feels like parts of it are missing. Kataoka keeps licking and kissing this scar on Izumi’s body that obviously means something, and it’s never explained. And then towards the end it shows some artist on TV having died and Izumi goes ‘I killed him’ and it’s never mentioned again. Umm what? Izumi also disappears and runs away during the story which makes Kataoka worry and chase him but it never explains why Izumi does this, or what he’s doing.
All this actually made me suspect June may have done that boneheaded thing they do where they license only a random part of a story (see: God of Dogs, or Millenium Darling), but my suspicion turned out to be untrue. Perhaps it was just compiled with space limitations or something, but it does seem like there is a chapter or two missing. It already feels somewhat scattered due to the narrative style, but the strange plot holes make it truly disjointed.
There were some bright spots though. Kujyou has some interesting paneling and draws really sensual kiss scenes, and there’s a lot of them in here – they’re better than the sex scenes mostly (of which there are also a decent amount). Yes you read that right, I liked the kiss scenes more than the sex scenes in this book. You may never see me type this sentence again so savor it, baby, before you read on. I’ll even bold it for you since I’m feeling naughty. 😏
Kataoka and Izumi are also a seke couple, and reverse roles. I love this dynamic because it makes them feel more like equal partners with size and personality stereotypes untethered from their sexual identity. It is nice to go beyond ’the smaller or shyer one is the uke’ trope that is really embedded in the genre once in a while.
Another highlight was also a super cute prequel story in the back that shows the couple’s high school days, how they met, and their first kiss. Couple he have drawn them any cuter?! I would read a whole volume of just this.
Aoi Kujyou is a very prolific mangka and has been active since the late 90s. I wonder if being male has been a selling point for him and boosted his career, allowing him to stand out from the pack and get his work attention from both publishers and readers if for no other reason than curiosity at what kind of work a male yaoi mangaka makes. I read three more of his later works just to be able to compare them because I felt like even here he was a better mangaka than this particular story let on, and this guy has done a ton of work since then.
Love Share was done in 2003, so I read one from 2007 called Koibito no Hirakikata (‘How to Get Your Guy To Open Up’), which was some one shots about 2-3 couples and it was maybe marginally better but still not great, and suffered from the same kinds of confusing and context-lacking story elements. Then I skipped ahead in time again and read two linked ones from 2012-2013 – 2-kai no Maria & Getsuyoubi no Maria (‘Maria Lives Upstairs’ and ’Monday Maria’), and by then Kujyou had definitely hit his stride and figured out how to write a good story – this was a sweet little gem of an age gap shounen-ai with a more developed plot, and one that I wish we could have in print although it is digitally licensed by manga.club. Lastly I read another one that manga.club licensed from 2015, Taikan Ondo Plus (‘Temperatures Rising/Warm Bodies Plus’) and this one was just as good as Monday Maria if not slightly better for me anyway because it was a salaryman romance and I love those, and also kept you guessing until the end. So I guess the TL;DR of this paragraph is: his later work is better, and you should check it out – especially if you like shounen-ai because his drawing seemed to get less explicit as time went on, but his kiss scenes were better than his sex scenes anyway even back then so this seemed like a natural progression for him. I’m kinda bummed we only got this and Duetto in print actually because his work really did get better later on, and I’m eager to check out his most recent stuff. His style has largely stayed the same over the years but became more polished, but even in this book it’s still pretty charming despite its age. Overall this early story of his is just a bit too all over the place with too many confusing and unexplained elements and I suspect Duetto might be the same, but he did definitely go on to improve in later years.
TLDR: This early work from male (😯) yaoi mangaka Aoi Kujyou suffers from a disjointed story that feels like pieces of it are missing, but a highlight was that there are a lot of pretty good kiss scenes and a very cutely-drawn prequel. The main couple was reversible too which I liked and there was also a lot of sex, though not too explicit. Although this story is a bit of miss, Aoi Kujyou was still budding as a mangaka at the time, and he went on to flower – start with 2012’s Monday Maria and go from there to see a definite upward progression in his work. We unfortunately don’t have any of his later work in print, but a lot of it has been licensed digitally at least.