Manhattan is a nice romantic backdrop for a BL. Towering skyscrapers, the hustle and bustle of the streets, tranquil Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, horns honking all hours of the day and night, congealed garbage on the sidewalk, footlong rats eating leftover pizza crust on the subway tracks, unobstructed views of Jersey City…sorry, was that last one too gross?
I’ve never liked a single work by Momoko Tenzen and think she was a pretty low tier mangaka, and I’m baffled why DMP licensed so much of her work. According to BL, the best way to get an edge in business deals is good sake and a long blowjob, so maybe Tenzen just happens to have a hot male friend who provided such talents to someone in the DMP camp. Theres a good BL story idea!
As the title suggests this book takes place in NYC, and it features linked one-shots with four different couples. The main story is a prince/pauper romance between flower shop owner Dan ‘Diamond’ Darling and his CEO boyfriend Rock Melville (uhh, her American names may need a bit of work).
Momoko Tenzen is in a league all her own when it comes to terrible BL art, which is well known around this blog (For more shining examples see Seven and Paradise on the Hill). Tenzen’s art is so bad she can’t even make the characters look like themselves and their facial proportions completely change throughout the book.
They have what Tenzen describes in the back as a “Harlequin romance” which I guess is that rich-guy-sweeps-you-off-your-feet cheesy Hallmark movie type of thing. They spend some time together between work, and that’s about all that happens…it’s too boring to be a drama and too dumb to be a slice-of-life story. At one point Dan finds out that Rock has a ex-wife and a kid and literally asks him, ‘if me or your kid was drowning, who would you save?’ The fuck kind of question is that?!
The “sex” in this book is the characters just in bed together kissing. If there’s once nice thing I can say about the story it’s that there’s some cute romantic bits, although they’re almost all ruined by Tenzen’s inability to draw. At the end, Rock buys a mansion with a lawn which mysteriously exists somewhere in the middle of Manhattan, and asks Dan to live with him.
The next couple is Dan’s assistant at the flower shop named Kanan, who meets a boy from Japan named Kenji. I swear, in every single manga I’ve ever read set outside Japan but in the real world, there always has to be a Japanese character somewhere, even if it has no bearing on the story – I guess it’s just too easy to draw what you know.
We first meet Kenji when he’s on a payphone (remember those?) with his sister who lives near NYC, asking her for a ride from the city. He promises to get toys for her toddler twins, Raphael and Gabriella (this is important later). His sister bails on him and it starts snowing and while thinking what to do he runs into Kanan who had given him flowers earlier. They end up getting a hotel and sleeping together. It must have been really good because they’re both totally in love after that.
Their story is about Kenji having to go back to Japan but promising to come to college in NYC so he can be with Kanan again. It’s the only story where anything dramatic happens really but again, Tenzen’s art just looks so sloppy and amateur that even if any of the stories were intriguing and well done (they aren’t), they’d just look so bad it wouldn’t matter.
Rock’s secretary Jessie also gets his own romance, he has a boyfriend named Louis who he accidentally spills coffee on (that’s the entire plot). I couldn’t help but notice this detail though: Jessie mentions that he and Rock work in the ‘tallest building in the city’ and this combined with the fact that the mangaka mentions in the back that these stories were done between 1998-2000 means they work in, uh…the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I guess no one thought about that since by the time the book was released in Japan and in the US, there was a new tallest building in NYC by “process of elimination” so there would be no reason to edit that line since he didn’t actually say he works in the WTC, but I still couldn’t un-think “so….would these guys technically be dead then?”
There’s something actually worse about this book than Momoko Tenzen’s art though, if you can believe that shit. Remember the toddlers mentioned in the story with the second couple? As soon as you flip the damn page there’s a story where they’re suddenly now 13…yeah, you know where this is going. The boy, Raphael, sees his creepy math teacher having sex with another student in a shed, and then that teacher comes onto him and confesses his love in the creepiest and most uncomfortable way he possibly could (by literally going up to him and saying “I’ve been watching you”) and touches him with his yaoi hands.
Thankfully there’s nothing physical that happens but this story was just so completely unnecessary, gross, and out of left field that its inclusion should have been seriously questioned. I am like, a thousand percent sure that anyone reading this book would have preferred more sex scenes with the adult characters rather than…this. It could have easily been way less creepy too, like why not just make the kid have a crush on another kid, or maybe make the kid crush innocently on his teacher first and the teacher laughs and teaches him gently about love? Instead this guy just comes onto this kid in the most uncomfortable and predatory way possible…ugh. Hard pass.
DMP released this in 2009, but it was published in Japan in 2002…which means they couldn’t have licensed it pre-9/11 and were just sitting on it a while to not seem insensitive, which was the only plausible reason I could think of to explain the seven-year gap. I have trouble believing Tenzen was selling THAT well. I wonder if they were specifically wanting an ‘American’ themed story or something…who knows. Either way…DMP, ill forgive you for some shit you licensed in 2005, but 2009 is pushing it. Whatever department picks your licenses is smoking cocoa puffs if they think this was worth releasing at all.
TL;DR: Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams but this manga could