If you feel that the saying ‘variety is the spice of life’ also applies to shounen-ai school stories, here’s something that covers a few food groups on that particular plate. We’ve got strawberries, ghosts, horny librarians, alcoholism, poorly whistled renditions of ‘Scarborough Fair,’ depression brought on by cell phone novels, and of course – a proper staple of this kind of diet – a school roof blow job. Where else would you get the protein? (!)
Aki Senoo is a newer mangaka relatively speaking, with her first published work appearing in Japan in 2005 according to Baka; WtHS is apparently her third work. She only has 6 titles total listed with the latest being in 2014, so not sure what she is up to now, poking around online by searching her name in kanji didn’t turn up much, not that I’m any good at sleuthing in Japanese.
Aaaaaanyway – so this book is basically a series of 16+ school one-shots with a slice of life flavor. They vary in quality – the best two or three are decently enjoyable reads, but for the worst of them, the fact that the characters have so little background or context coupled with insipid interactions makes them too vague to truly get into. Part of this is due to Senoo’s art style, which is airy and minimal. I think it’s a bit of a cross between Yukine Honami and Sumomo Yumeka, though is far from surpassing either. She has good visual shorthand and can establish form with a minimal amount of strokes, but unlike Yumeka for example in doing this she doesn’t always manage to preserve the character’s emotion. To be fair she is a fairly green mangaka and no doubt still developing, and I think her storytelling definitely needs work, and the dialogue and panels in some places are either so vague or so jarring that sometimes it feels like a page is missing. I think her ideas are good, they just need better execution. Granted, I haven’t read her most recent work, so she definitely could have improved since this book was published.
The first story, “Fragment,” is the best example of this good-idea-but-poor-execution thing. It’s about two students who connect when one whistles part of a song he doesn’t fully know, and another student shows him how the rest goes. Eventually they fuck, of course.
I thought this idea was super cute, and in the hands of someone like the aformentioned Yumeka it could have really been special. According to Senoo it started as an older doujin and not too much was edited, which probably explains why it’s the weakest one.
Next we have ‘Absolute Condition,’ which comes surprisingly close to PWP for a 16+ title. Two students named Kusaka (who’s ‘straight’) and Ogata (who’s not straight) become attracted to each other and fuck for a few pages in an empty classroom, after which one of them says the L word super unconvincingly. That’s the cynical version, anyway.
You’ll never hear me truly complain about yaoi sex scenes in this little corner of the internet, but the light touch of the drawing style and the fact that you see virtually nothing anyway doesn’t make it anything to write home about.
The third story is easily the frontrunner for the year’s Best Title Award for the short story category with “I Like Strawberries The Most, Followed By My Dad” (seriously that is the title). It was only marginally better than the first two, and also features the ubiquitous school roof blow job. I need to make a tag for those, they’ve been popping up a lot lately.
Plot summary in two sentences: Ashihara is depressed because he got his hair cut too short and has been reading a romance cell phone novel with a sad ending. Shiomi cheers him up by giving him a blowjob and then riding him on the school roof and then they eat strawberries. So, uh, in related news, how can we send a movie pitch to Ryan Gosling and Chris Hemsworth’s agents?
For me it was this weird in-between where it has too much extra stuff to be a porn plot but not really enough to care about the characters, which affects many one-shot compilations.
The middle story, ‘I Can’t Remember Now,’ was my favorite, because it felt the most realistic. I’m not sure if it was actually the longest one but it felt like it; it developed the characters a bit more and had a better ending than the others.
We have Midori who can’t lay off the alcohol, and when he drinks he gets flirty and kissy with his friend Kacchan. The latter has feelings for the former but hides them, which makes it more difficult when Midori comes onto him while drunk. It’s a well-done and well-paced little story and one of two that I felt really overcame the book’s flaws.
The other is the next one, ‘Fever Mark,’ which features classmates Masaki and Aoi as friends-turned-lovers. Like the one before it, it also felt realistic, but turned up the fluff factor several notches. It reminded me why I like the stereotypical school yaoi love story so much – they’re so innocent and sweet, and hard for me not to love despite the tropes. It established just enough plot to make the characters memorable in a book that churns them out like a revolving door, and like ‘I Can’t Remember Now,’ it had a nice ending and good pacing.
The last two, ‘That Which Falls From Heaven’ and ‘That Which Is Still Here,’ are linked. There actually isn’t much BL bits in these two, especially in the last one (though implied); the story is much more plot-driven. It also has something you probably didn’t see coming at this point, and that thing is: guro. (kidding, but wouldn’t that be a climax?) Actually, it’s ghosts. Takagi is shocked to discover that his school friend Sumoi (who I think are the ones on the cover) can see his dead brother Tsukasa’s ghost. How or why this is so, it doesn’t really explain, but Sumoi draws realistic pictures of him just hanging out doing ghost things and he never even met him.
The second part involves a librarian named Saikawa who had a crush on the now-dead Tsukasa. He sees Sumoi drawing him in the library, because apparently his ghost is just hanging out attending to important ghost business near a window, and Sumoi gives him the drawing, adjusting the eyes so that it looks like he’s looking at Saikawa at the librarian’s desk. There is no ghost sex, in case you were wondering. Which makes me wonder…does ghost sex still technically fall under necrophilia? Or would it be called something else? (a cursory google search turned up an inconclusive answer, but apparently there is a name for sexual attraction to ghosts (‘spectrophilia’) and there are also a bunch of news stories about a British woman who claims she gave up men to have sex with ghosts, if you want to go down an internet black hole).
Anyway – I wouldn’t be surprised is this was the last story of the bunch that she did because it has the best art. The attention to detail is better, noticeably in the backgrounds, and her style is more confident – this on top of only using one screentone pattern, which I wouldn’t even have noticed had she not mentioned it. I have not seen her more recent work, but even within this book she improved and I’m curious to see if she solidified her style and what it became.
I did get a bit confused in the first part but overall the idea was original and the story was mostly pretty good. It wasn’t really much of a BL story as mentioned – it more just had BL undercurrents – but, idk, I guess it was enough of one to make the cut. It was different in a good way, and nice to read at least one story in the book that didn’t have an entirely new set of characters to get familiar with.
One compliment I can give Aki Senoo is that, in a book with about 20 characters, she managed to make the majority of them look unique – that’s certainly commendable. Curiously, this appears to be her only shounen-ai work, the rest of her stuff listed on Baka appears to be straight-up yaoi. I’m even more curious now what her other work is like and why they picked this one to license. Further research must be done, so I’ll definitely have to read her other stuff if I can find scanlations. For science, of course.
TL;DR: An ok title, maybe just barely a ‘good’ one – I *think* this is the mangaka’s debut work however, so I’m accounting for that. Cute set of 16+ one shots with fluff and variety. They vary in quality both story- and art-wise, but the best two or three of them are great little reads.