Is your new year’s resolution to read more bad yaoi hanging around in your collection that you can get rid of, or is that just me? Honestly, making a half-hearted attempt at getting in shape like normal people would probably be easier than that. I have read yaoi at the gym before though, so perhaps I can combine the two – I used to bring a volume with a discreet cover to read while I was on the elliptical or bike. Nothing like burning through gay porn while burning calories! The Yaoi Bike 801, now with a detachable dildo on the seat, for only the classiest ladies obviously.
This is a real snoozer of a read and has all the hallmarks of what June licensed around this time. Boring stories, no sex, and art that is absolutely, incredibly, wonderfully…average. There’s 4 different stories in here and not a single one stood out to me in any way, except that too many characters looked too much alike. This is slightly more excusable in a book of one-shots with many characters like this, but their personalities were even pretty much the same too.
The story that shared the name with the book and has the characters on the cover was about these two, Kikuchi-kun who works at a bookstore and Kaji-san who is a customer he likes. They romance each other and spend a lot of time talking/texting on flip phones because this was drawn in 2005.
There’s also a story about two salarymen and one is depressed about being ‘old’ at 25 because a girl called him “sir” on the train. It was the only couple that felt sort of real-life, in that they had pretty normal issues without crazy drama.
There’s another salaryman couple who are also really and totally not the same characters as the panel above, and this story centers around a misunderstanding about a guy who gets upset because a young woman at work is marrying someone with his boyfriend’s last name and thus he thinks his boyfriend is a straight guy who has just been pretending to be gay. Turns out the woman was actually marrying his dad…totally not weird to have a mother-in-law younger than you.
Speaking of weight loss earlier, there’s also a sort-of fat fetish story in here. I say ‘sort of’ because it turns out the character didn’t have a fat fetish, he just thought that it was better to tell his crush he had a fat fetish than that he was ‘just’ gay. Because obviously if you’re worried about someone accepting your homosexuality, they’ll definitely be way more accepting if you have an abnormal fetish too!
As you’ve probably seen, there is nothing impressive about the art here. It’s on the lower end of passable and obviously dated to the modern eye. Mishima also draws mouths in a bizarre way on characters in profile.
Mishima-sensei is actually still active today and has a decent-sized back catalog of yaoi, although all the work we have from her in English is from the 00s (June also put out You Make My Head Spin and Mamiya Doll House by her). I checked out some of her more recent work and her art is more polished and modern but she still draws mouths in profile weird. I guess she made it a stylistic thing?
Anyway – to me, shounen-ai shines best when the characters are either just realizing their feelings or just started dating, because the focus is typically on the early romance and then it doesn’t feel like any sex was noticeably cut out. Despite this book’s title, about half the characters are already in established and sexual relationships and something more than a light kiss or two felt noticeably missing from those stories in particular. Mishima’s characters here are all either forward with their feelings or have some kind of drama or misunderstanding in which makeup sex would be the natural path the characters would take, but it doesn’t even happen ‘off camera’ or implied. There’s also not that much romance or romantic development in general, making it a weak shounen-ai by my standards.
TL;DR: Given that there is not much romance or relationship development here despite the title, the stories in this book of four one-shots would definitely have worked better as a yaoi, as ‘something more than kissing’ feels noticeably missing from most stories based on the characters’ relationships and personalities. The art is also pretty dated, too many of the characters not only look the same but act the same, and it’s just overall a forgettable read. Mishima-sensei is actually still drawing yaoi though and her more recent work is for sure better, although she still has a weird way of drawing mouths in profile.