We’re back-to-back with Kazuhiko Mishima books today, and thankfully this one is a bit better than First Stage of Love, but not by much. Oh but there’s sex! Great right? Well, it feels completely out of place and there’s no dick…in 2008, June was still slowly dipping its toes in the dick pool. Also the art isn’t great. But the characters are ok. Can’t have your yaoi cookies and eat them too with this one, but it’s an ok snack, even if it’s a tad stale and the frosting is too hard.
This book contains two stories, the main one taking place at the Japanese equivalent of a ghetto high school, and opens with some characters talking about huffing paint fumes. New straitlaced transfer student Shindou quickly falls for his delinquent tsundere classmate Yousuke, and their relationship quickly gets physical. Too quickly.
I noted in my First Stage of Love review that that book was a shounen-ai that should have been a yaoi. Interestingly, this book has the opposite problem – it’s a yaoi that would have worked better as a shounen-ai (I can’t believe I’m saying this either) because the two or three sex scenes in this story that give the book its M rating feel completely shoehorned in, and seem out of character for the personality of both Shindou and Yousuke – the first one in particular happens way sooner than felt natural, Shindou basically walks in Yousuke’s house, confesses his feelings, and they instantly get some dubcon-laced sex going on.
Shindou was established as a kind and friendly boy so this aggressive sexual move seems out of character – same for Yousuke, a resistant and foul-mouthed tsundere who suddenly just accepts it. I’m serious about the foul-mouthed part though – this book has a ton of swearing and someone is saying “fuck” like every page, I guess to show that Yousuke and his friends are rough around the edges or maybe just to polish that M rating. Don’t worry, there is some very romantic dialogue though:
The sex scenes were also short, dubcon-flavored, and no dick was shown, so it’s not like it would have been much of a loss if they weren’t there anyway. The characters were interesting enough – I like the delinquent uke character type – but they don’t really act or develop along the lines of their personalities.
The second story, ‘Sensei,’ is a student-falling-for-teacher shounen-ai that was surprisingly pretty cute. This story definitely worked better with no sex, and the relationship developed to the point where it probably would have in real life (i.e., it went nowhere) and the teacher maturely handled his student’s feelings without getting physical (in a yaoi?! Can you believe that Twilight Zone shit?!). It would have been nice to see a part 2 continuation once the student MC is older, because she laid the story groundwork well here but sadly it didn’t blossom into something more.
The art was pretty much the same as in First Stage of Love, so blah but passable – it was drawn in 2007, so set your expectations accordingly. Kazuhiko Mishima is surprisingly still an active yaoi artist though and her more recent work is better, and worth checking out – we don’t have anything of hers more recent officially licensed in English, but you can find some scanlations online.
TL:DR: This book’s main story was a yaoi that would have worked better as a shounen-ai – the main couple were two students, a delinquent tsundere uke and strait-laced transfer student, and the sex felt completely forced and out of place. The second story was a student-crushing-on-teacher shounen-ai that wasn’t much more than just a good beginning.