I’m in the middle of burning through everything I have by this mangaka because after Party and Hot Steamy Glasses were both very bleh, I expected this to also be bleh, and I really need the shelf space for other stuff. And it was very…well, bleh. This manga almost epitomizes mid 00s mediocre yaoi. Art was bleh. Stories were bleh. Sex was bleh. Everything was just…bleh? Bleh. Try not to be too impressed by my creative use of adjectives here…
Love Training is set at an isolated all-boys school, Sakurajo High, and consists of a series of one-shots having to do with various students there. The only story that really stuck out was the first one, in which transfer student Koji meets his two new twin step-brothers at the school, and one of them (named Jin) immediately tries to get in Koji’s pants. Neither of them mention that this is weird because they’re step-brothers. ‘Hey, our parents are doing it, why not us!’
It was quite average and goes downhill from there – and the next five stories all get progressivley more boring than the one before it until I was nearly falling asleep. To make it worse her sex scenes are always very short at one or two pages, show nothing, and are not the least bit hot to look at.
I only really remember the 2nd one because I think it has the most sex, it’s about a kid named Makoto who gets the brilliant idea of trying to get with his crush by going to his room a bunch pretending to be a call boy.
The other 3 or so stories in the book are so forgettable they’re barely even really worth mentioning. One is a shounen-ai, one revolves around two lovers in a school play, and the last is about two teachers. All of them give saltine crackers a run for their money in terms of blandness.
I think the art is marginally worse in here than it was in Party, but marginally better than Hot Steamy Glasses. Pretty much every character looks the same and has the same expressions. It has an M rating and there are sex scenes sprinkled around but all of them are super short and show nothing as previously mentioned, so you don’t even have that to look forward to. I don’t know if it’s just Taiya’s style or what but all three of her books I’ve read so far just come off as either rushed or lazy.
If there’s one bright spot here it’s…look how far we’ve come! This is what passed as good BL once upon a time. No longer do we have to settle for lifeless characters in same-y school plots with awkward art and yawn-inducing sex scenes with questionable anatomy. I guess we can thank these early June titles for paving the way for what we have now, but thankfully the bar has been raised since then, my friends. We have one last Kaiya title in English with a physical release, ‘Physical Attraction,’ and I’m going to put all my chips in on that one and hope it’s the one title of hers that isn’t…well, bleh. I heard good things about it so let’s hope she managed to lay a golden egg. Stick around and find out!
TL;DR: This book of one-shots centered around students and pairings at the same high school is like the quintessential mid 00s yaoi. In other words, it’s thoroughly mediocre in every way possible. Each story gets progressively more uninspired, making it a painfully boring read. I’ve read worse, sure, and maybe it was more appealing back when there was less BL to compare it to, but the only people I can imagine liking this in this day and age are sheltered teen girls without internet discovering BL for the first time.