Are you in the mood for cute, sexy, lighthearted BL? Well hopefully not because this one is… dramatic, emotional, and tragic, so I guess the total opposite. But when it comes to those kinds of stories, Kano Miyamoto really knows how to wring the emotional washcloth and make you feel for the characters, so if you want to get the feels you’re in good hands.
I really loved the other Miyamoto title I’ve read, Say Please, and judging by that story and summaries of her other work she really seems to like the theme of gay prostitution, which shows up in this story as well. Toru Shinomiya is a beautiful college kid who models for a gay photography student named Matsuoka, who ends up paying him for sex after the shoot. Toru agrees mainly out of curiosity, but his low morals and regard for his body eventually lead him down the path of working at a gay club where he regularly sleeps with men for money. He regularly tries to swoon a Matsuoka lookalike and bi lurker at the club named Hikaru, who always balks at the idea of buying sex. But Matsuoka harbors genuine feelings for Toru and they continue to sleep together on and off, eventually without money being exchanged, and they start living together as friends with benefits even though their feelings are unspoken.
It’s here that the story deals a big emotional blow that I won’t spoil, but suffice it to say I was genuinely shocked. After this event, Toru struggles on a difficult road of heartbreak to overcome the fallout, and feel whole again.
This was a really strong story and it’s hard not to feel for the characters. We see the story from Toru’s POV so we get a big dose of his inner thoughts and struggles. I really like her art and particularly her facial expressions, which are subtle yet convey a lot of emotion. The sex scenes are hot have a sort of raw erotic edge to them, despite not being that explicit.
The story has a soft ending but does continue on in a different Miyamoto work called Rules, a three-part work that we don’t have licensed in English. But we have scans! So it turns out that there’s a sort of “Miyamoto cinematic universe” that includes these characters and a couple more with interlocking stories in a sort of loose web. It seems they can mostly be read separately like this and the order doesn’t really matter, and Miyamoto has great characters so it’s also nice to be able to follow them in other works.
So I did read the scans of Rules 1-3 which are all excellent stories (really, can Miyamoto write a bad story?), the first mainly focusing on Hikaru and a high schooler called Yuki who develop a weird situationship. Yuki is gay but crushes on a classmate named Atori, who also briefly shows up in Lovers and Souls where it is hinted he and Toru will have some kind of connection later on. Toru himself also makes a couple brief appearances, although is not really involved in any way. The second part of Rules is the sequel to his story in Lovers and Souls in which he starts dating Atori, and the third part is more continuation of that along with some drama with Hikaru, Atori, and Yuki. All three are definitely worth a read if you want to follow the characters some more and see if Toru gets his happy ending (hint: he might, but not before making some bad decisions).
The second part of Lovers and Souls featues a one-shot with two high best friends named Nozaki and Kai. Nozaki comes out as gay and Kai doesn’t really know how to react, but soon gets curious and they start to sexually experiment. There is more sex in this story, which is appreciated, but it’s not more explicit than how she usually draws it. It’s a cute one-shot though.
It’s worth noting that for how sleazy the sex is in her work, there’s no non-con or rapey grossness, which I like. All in all, these stories cement my conviction that Miyamoto is a really underrated mangaka. It doesn’t help that Deux Press was a pretty small pub and was the only one who had any of her English work until SuBLime put out Sleeping Moon a while back, but she deserves to be more well known.
TL;DR: Miyamoto excels at drawing these sort of raw, unglamorous situationships that often feature prostitution, casual sex, struggles with gay identity, and potent emotional currents. The main story is really strong and poignant story with great characters that slaps you upside the head with feels. There is also a less-heavy side story with a lot of sex which is a nice palate cleanser from the emotional roller coaster of the first one. The main story has a sequel in a scanlated three-part work called Rules that is also pretty good.