A much better and more descriptive title for this book would be “The Cure for Insomnia.” Badum-tisch. Unless you really love bad and boring shounen-ai in which case, come on in ye olde blog post, I’ve got something for you. Or if you were the seme of this book you’d say “I got sumthin’ fer ya.” Yeah, they really made him talk like that the whole book.
The Devil Inside stars a high schooler named Kouma who falls in love hard and has trouble finding a girl who will put up with his clinginess, when he gets told by a fortune teller that soon he’ll meet his perfect match. He then gets playfully “kidnapped” by the same guy, who turns out to be the owner of a magic store named Sougo. Despite misgivings from Kouma about love in general, a genuine relationship starts to blossom between them.
Once Kouma gets non-seriously “kidnapped” (their description, it’s more like “playfully insisting”) by Sougo he lives with him in his magic store, although I’m not sure why this was the case in the first place as it wasn’t necessary for the story and just lended a bit of an icky vibe to the whole thing. Sougo doesn’t come onto Kouma in a forceful way but it’s very clear he’s interested in him, and it makes Kouma seem like a complete and total idiot for just being like “guess I’ll just live with this random guy I just met who also maybe wants to have sex with me, nothing weird should happen.” Sougo’s line of work as a fortune teller and vendor of scammy magic shit doesn’t really help him seem less sketchy either. But the absolute worst part of it and what made this such an annoying read is that they gave Sougo a fucking hillbilly accent and he talks like that the freaking whole manga.
It’s mentioned briefly that Sougo has some kind of accent, but it doesn’t say what kind, and frankly this is literally the worst one they could have picked. Sometimes in older manga you see characters with a kansai-ben given a sort of Southern accent like this because I guess the translators failed to realize how utterly stupid it is to equate someone with a Kyoto accent to someone who talks like an Appalachian hillbilly. Since it didn’t say where Sougo was from, what they should have done was give him a British, European, or some sort of “posh” sounding accent, as this would have made Sougo seem more mysterious and devilish. Instead he just sounds like a cowboy or something and it really just doesn’t fit his character at all. It’s also incredibly annoying to read someone talk that way for an entire book.
This a 16+ title but there’s a decent amount of (none-explicit) physical scenes. Despite Sougo having a lot of sketchy qualities and describing himself as having a “devil inside,” he’s pretty much all talk and their romance is actually pretty wholesome – there’s no real consent issues, which was almost genuinely surprising. Kouma doesn’t do a whole lot in this book except tell the reader how much he loves Sougo and what it feels like to love someone, so it has a bit of a gooey romantic tone.
The art isn’t bad; at least the characters are attractive. Unfortunately the story and characters are incredibly boring unless you’re really a sucker for the cheesiest sort of romance and happy endings, all else be damned. Kouma in particular has the personality of a wet rag and Sougo just has a weird pastiche of mismatched character traits on top of his terrible accent, I’m not sure what Fukiyama was trying to do with him but it’s possible it was lost in this bad localization. It’s a very lighthearted, “safe” story and there’s nothing wrong with a casual read, but it just has so little substance it feels like an entire book of filler.
TL;DR: A lighthearted romance between a lovelorn high schooler and some kind of…strange fortune teller dude who runs a magic shop. It’s very basic sort of cute fluff that doesn’t have much substance or much that actually happens, making it feel like extended filler. Anything it had going for it was pretty much ruined by a terrible localization choice – the seme was given a hillbilly accent for the entire story, which besides being annoying as hell, doesn’t fit the character of “mysterious fortune teller” in the least. But hey, at least there’s no rape I guess.