Tag: best endings

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SKYSCRAPERS OF OZ (Somei/Takakura)

“Mari Kudoh and his partner Yoichi are drop-dead gorgeous ‘Handymen,’ as they prefer to call themselves. With a dangerous ‘back door’ operation, these two live a double life as seductive hitmen!”

I’m glad I checked the back of the book before thinking I was super clever for thinking of the back door action pun first…

My friend and I joke that this book is like the common cold of yaoi in that it is always at every manga clearance sale. One might assume that this means its bad, and we were curious to find out for sure. So what was the verdict? For me, it was similar to my feeling about Lost Boys – ‘huh, this is better than I thought it would be!’ This is one great benefit of having low expectations. Also, turns out the reason this manga seems to be everywhere is that it sold really well, having been released right as US yaoi obsession was peaking. This is one of those books that would have been better then, when there was less English-licensed yaoi around for comparison – it’s not terrible, but it does pale next to our modern tomes and tales of butt-fucking.

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JAZZ (Maeda/Takamure)

This series made me genuinely curious if, in ‘real’ doctor/patient romantic relationships, the ‘patient’ continues to call his partner ‘Doc!’ during sex even after they’ve been together for years, like the couple in this book. I’m just wondering if it’s an anomaly. I would think that’s something you’d get out of your system relatively quickly if you date them long enough (and thus presumably care about them as a person enough) to call them by their actual name when balls deep in their asshole. Granted, when I fantasize about [entering serious judgment-free zone] General Hux from Star Wars, in my head I mostly call him by his title, but that’s a fantas- well…ok, maybe I answered my own question.


I’m not sure if Jazz was ever a super-popular yaoi series (if it ever had momentum it’s most likely because it was in the right place at the right time) but it’s certainly a widely circulated one, in that if you are new to the genre and discovering what’s out there you will probably come across this one sooner rather than later. It’s a four-part patient-x-doctor story that manages to overcome its flaws by the end – if the backwards seme/uke age dynamics don’t bother you that is, and gratuitous rape in the first two volumes notwithstanding (more on that later). The art is lovely to look at and the story runs the gamut of emotions from happiness to hopelessness, silliness to seriousness, and heartbreak to healing. Don’t tell me that alliteration didn’t excite you.

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DOUBLE CAST (Mamahara/Mizuhashi)

Rival actor co-stars getting it on is up there on my list of favorite yaoi plots, shortly behind high schoolers getting it on, hi FBI nothing to see here, guys in period costume getting it on, business/work rivals getting it on, and powerful fantasy kings or demons getting it on. You can’t say I don’t have diverse tastes, I guess.

As far as the rival-actors-turned-costars theme, Double Cast doesn’t quite do this as well as Hero Heel or Embracing Love, but it’s still a solid entry in this category. The story is a good mix of salacious and sincere, such that it satisfied my inner trashy gossip mag fantasies without reading like one.

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CONSTELLATIONS IN MY PALM (Honami/Sakuragi)

I seem to be on a Honami kick right now. I apparently just happen to be reading the books she drew in an order where I like each successive one more than the last. No doubt this pattern can only last for so long but I was curious to see if I’d find my new favorite book of hers at the end of the trail. It might be too early to say, but this one is going to be hard to top – Constellations in My Palm is not only my favorite book Honami has worked on (the 5th of hers I’ve read), it has one of the most touching, beautiful, and tear-jerking stories of any yaoi I’ve read in a long while. Really, it’s that good.

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L’ETOILE SOLITAIRE (Yuno Ogami)

Library sales are pretty unexpected places to find M-rated yaoi. If they have a manga section at all, much less one that has anything other than dog-eared copies of Naruto and Dragonball Z, they’d probably never (knowingly) put BL in it, because the last thing any parent wants is their 9-year-old finding a volume of Level C while were just innocently ogling the covers of Love Hina and running up to them loudly asking what a creampie is or why a man would want to stick his pee-pee in your butt. But lo and behold, I unearthed this puppy at a library sale one time, the only yaoi book I have found at one to date. It even still had the bonus postcard intact which was pretty cool. Made me wonder how it ended up there and who it used to belong to. I’ll bet it was a member of Congress. I like to think my state representative is secretly a fudanshi, it’s about time someone stood up for the most important issues of our time, like needless censoring.


L’Etoile Solitaire is the debut story of Yuno Ogami, and possibly her only published work unless she has a pseudonym – she’s somewhat of a ghost, and seems to have all but disappeared from the manga world. Her website/blog is still up but hasn’t been updated in years, and interestingly still has a post up from this book’s launch where she did a custom illustration of the main characters for her readers. This story was a ‘Japanese Original English Language’ manga, a term which makes zero sense to me but apparently just means it was commissioned. Since we now know it was the only real story she ever did, we have nothing to really compare it to nor could witness an evolution in her style, sadly. I wish she hadn’t dropped off the map after this because I think she was would have become a really great mangaka.

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FAKE (Sanami Matoh) + OVA

Much how I feel about most ‘classics’ in literature, this is a series that I wanted to have read, but didn’t actually want to read. When it comes to yaoi, I usually feel this way about early 00s-era multi-volume 16+ series, like Gravitation. Whether or not Fake and Gravitation would be regarded as ‘shounen-ai classics’ (at least in the US market) is debatable – actually I don’t think the subgenre has been around long enough here, much less with any real visibility, for people to start throwing around that word yet. Still, they’re perhaps among the most well-known of the shounen-ai books, if only because they didn’t have a lot of competition back in 2003. More pontification on that after the jump.


The reason I shy away from these older multi-volume 16+ series is largely because 1) pacing issues/too much filler, which affect a lot of multi-volume series tbf 2) a large time commitment 3) nothing explicit 4) the drawing style either feels outdated or just isn’t up my alley. 5) They’re often mostly geared towards a teenage audience and not an adult one. I also think context needs some consideration, these series are a product of their time. 2003 was a year before you could easily pull up free manga/scanlations/porn on the internet, or actually, really anything on the internet, because you probably still had dial-up and your mom had to hang up the phone for you to log onto AIM. June wasn’t even around yet and you couldn’t exactly go down to the bookstore and buy anything resembling a Sakira title, and the LGBT community was less visible than it is today. Yaoi was pretty underground stuff, difficult to acquire and definitely not in English.

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