This is a nice collection of BL stories, and it does a decent job of establishing and developing characters for being a 5-story one-shot compilation. Ueda is pretty good with short stories and I felt like they all delivered
The first is a high school pairing in which a boy named Nao crushes on his senpai Taira, but before he can confess he gets caught up in a scheme pretending to be a female classmate’s boyfriend. Taira begins to get distant but it turns out he secretly felt the same about Nao.
Second we have x and x, friends in college who met at a gay bay and now in the working world. Miki shows up on x’s doorstep one day, needing a place to stay. He’s always crushed on x and has chased him for years, but x always turned him down. He had a boyfriend for a little while who dumped him, and he can’t seem to truly get over him. X finds he enjoys living with Miki though, who takes on a housekeeper role for x until he finds a job. when x’s ex-bf comes back in the picture begging for him back, he has to decide if it’s his ex or Miki he wants to give his heart to.
It’s a little ambitious for such a short story, with a lot of background info being told in flashbacks.
my favorite two were Direction of a Smile (Sako pulled on my heartstrings!) and Mix (particularly strong story elements here).
An Afterword at the end hinted that Ueda is a bit shy in drawing sex scenes or having characters talk about sexual things, which would explain why most of the intimate moments focus on the emotions of the characters and their faces rather than their bodies – this made those panels particularly intimate and I think it’s easy to feel a strong connection to the characters’ feelings. This was also heightened by her art style, which uses a very thin, delicate line weight throughout. I also liked that the semes/ukes came across as equal partners in the their relationships and did not seem stereotypical. Overall a really strong collection that I will definitely be reading again. Really glad I picked this one up at Bookoff!