After reading ‘Star’ by Kanno and generally enjoying the story (we’ll talk about the art later), I decided to dip into the other licensed title we have from this mangaka. Starring two high school friends who become something more, the two-part ‘Words of Devotion’ starts out a bit slow and feels more formulaic than ‘Star,’ but she manages to make the characters feel like real people despite it being a standard school romance at heart, and had many scenarios I find hot in yaoi.
Spread out over these two volumes is a main story, a secondary story, and two side stories. The stars of the main title story, a school slice-of-life, are high school graduates Tachibana and Ohtani, who rent an apartment together. Although they are ‘more than friends’ they are not out as gay to anyone yet, so they just pretend to be nothing but roommates. This story has a female main character as well, their former classmate and mutual friend Yuki, who crushes on one of the boys but can’t seem to get between them since they go everywhere together.
Their story is somewhat basic BL fare but the characters are likable and feel real, and it’s a nice slice-of-life with some touches of humor. Vol 2 goes back in time to show how they got together in high school…originally they both dated other girls but slowly started experimented with each other, either through convenience or curiosity, and eventually realized they liked each other more than their girlfriends.
This ‘sexual exploration’ part was my favorite part of the story because it felt really realistic, plus it had one of my favorite things in BL which is two bi-curious guys jerking off together in the same room. when I was in high school I thought that guys jerking off was a group activity, and that when dudes hung out together in each other’s rooms they were basically just watching porn, measuring each other’s dicks, and having a group jerk all the time (turns out they were mostly watching ESPN, playing video games, and rating the tits of their female classmates). Either way, this story really hit on that fantasy for me, and I went from being really tepid about it to liking it. Handjobs will do that I guess? but really, I dont often read BL that spends so much time on the sexual exploration and experimentation aspect, much less one that actually does it well and realistically, so I have to give credit for this.
The first side story ‘To the Ends of the Earth’ is about a boy named Hirofumi with a massive crush on fellow school soccer club member Shinji. It culminates in both boys being overcome with desire so much that they jerk each other off in the clubroom, a scenario I found muy picante. Seriously, this manga is almost batting 1000 in terms of scenarios that I love. Kanno mentioned in the afterward though that this story originally had a sex scene in the magazine version but not this one for some reason. Well, consider my jimmies rustled. I’m not sure why this would be, but she also said the dialogue of all the stories underwent heavy revisions as well.
These first two stories have a nice feature that ‘Star’ also shares, which is likable female characters. If BL has a female character at all she’s usually written as a villain or bitch, indifferent of whether she’s competing with the main couple or not. It’s a nice change in yaoi to see girls who aren’t written to be bad people, especially ones who act as narrators and whose thoughts and feelings you can see. Also like ‘Star,’ this story features bisexuality front and center, which I liked because I think it feels realistic for questioning teens to be more comfortable being bi rather than fully embrace being gay right off the bat (I’m not gay so I don’t actually know but I think it fits these particular characters better in any case)
The next side story ‘Waiting for Spring’ was uh… completely weird and out of place. Rich kid Miyata struggles making friends in school so he does what any of us what do of course, which is chloroforming and kidnapping his classmate (Kasahara) and keeping him chained up for a week so that he can have a friend. But don’t worry, Kasahara becomes ok with this for some totally logical reason. Um, what the fuck? Seriously, this story was so dumb and unnecessary it made my brain hurt, I’m not sure if Konno was just trying to do something out of her comfort zone or what but just – no. Was this really necessary in such a sweet, wholesome book of explicit boy sex? Jeez…
The one positive is that they don’t actually get physical which surprised me because I assumed this awful nonsense was going to be some kind of stockholm syndrome fetish PWP. But no, Miyata just kind of lets him go after a week and they become friends. Wow, I wish someone had told me a little chlofoform works works wonders when I was struggling to make friends in middle school!
The last couple is wannabe American actor Alfred and his Japanese boyfriend Shou, who are in a long-distance relationship.
Shou is Ohtani’s friend and in vol 2 their two stories overlap, when Al goes to Japan to see Shou. In one part, Shou finds out that Al posed nude and did porn in order to get money for the plane ticket to see him, and he takes this shockingly well. See kids, this is what people had to do back in the old days before OnlyFans, they had to actually do real porn for quick money. Can you imagine? People used to have to use rotary dials to call each other too (thank God we’ve moved past that) and if you wanted to waste time on the internet you had to sit at a desktop computer rather than use your phone to scroll memes on the toilet, it was a real Dark Ages.
This couple was ok but their storyline wasn’t as strong or developed, and I could take it or leave it. Having been in more than one long distance relationship I know how hard they are and how much it sucks, so maybe it was also a little too close to home.
There was enough in here altogether to warrant an M rating but it was not all that explicit, preferring to show their facial expressions rather than naughty bits but this was fine – most of the sexual parts did not include actual sex but this was fine by me because I can honestly take or leave anal when it comes down to it; I like the positions when theyre facing each other better and most of the time anal in yaoi is doggystyle. It’s times like this where I hope my mom hasn’t found this blog…
Kanno’s art style is the same as ‘Star’ but I think it lends itself better to the younger characters here. I still don’t really *like* her art, gives me some slight Keiko Kinoshita PTSD (of ‘You and Harujion’s quote-unquote ‘fame’) but it’s passable for a yaoi drawn 20+ years ago. I do think I am going to give it a higher rating than most people would because it has some particular scenarios in it that I enjoy, but I do think the main story is an cute and enjoyable read if you can get past the art.
TL;DR Slow-burn slice of life with a strong main story, a good side story, a less-good-but-ok secondary story, and a very bad side story that I am going to pretend I never read. Overall, the main story hit all the right chords for me with some particular scenarios I like in BL so I enjoyed it, and even though it by no means reinvents the wheel it has some nice touches. I particularly loved how she gave the sexual experimentation piece a lot of room to breathe, had nice female side characters, and explored bisexuality. I could see modern readers being bored by it though and disliking the dated art, which is definitely the weak point — but I did take into account this book was made in 2000.