Tag: good for beginners

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HONEY DARLING (Norikazu Akira)

I literally reviewed about 20 old forgotten June titles in a row in the past couple months, so it’s time to read some other imprints for a change (June just happens to have the largest back catalog of yaoi published in English by miles, which is why I always seem to be reading their stuff). Let’s pick one from the vault of the current top dog in BL publishing – SuBLime!

Shockingly, this is the very first SuBLime title I’ve talked about on this blog, (mainly because I usually talk about older or sucky titles and they have neither), so I thought I should start with one of their first ones, Honey Darling from 2012. This is a fan favorite with enduring popularity, in fact just yesterday I let a fujo I was selling some stuff to online pick a free BL from my box of 20 or so doubles and she immediately and enthusiastically chose Honey Darling (over much newer titles like Twilight out of Focus and even Dick Fight Island, mind you).

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KISSING (Sasaki/Takaku)

‘Can you still call someone ‘just a friend’ after kissing?’ this book asks. Why yes, you can do exactly that – surely they know what friends with benefits are? Or, you can kiss someone and decide ‘yeah, no,’ which was the experience of my first kiss. I was 14 and he was 16 which I remember mattering (oh, he’s a ‘junior and you’re a freshman!’ my friends cooed). He invited me to the movies after class and we went to see the terrible sequel of an already-terrible romcom and then we sat there watching the credits roll kind of waiting in anticipation to see if the other was interested in this mouth touching thing people seemed to like. We were both shy naturally but finally the whole theater was empty so we went for it. I don’t think he knew it was my first kiss and for that I am very grateful. I remember hating it – eww, boy tongue – and watching a guy who worked there sweeping popcorn out of the corner of my eye and I felt weirded out that he was smiling at us and then it occurred to me that maybe I was supposed to close my eyes anyway. Don’t worry, the kissing in here is much hotter than that…

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BEYOND MY TOUCH (Tomo Maeda)


I have a tag on this blog for books that are “good for beginners,” and this is one of those that’s ideal for the innocent BL virgins among us looking to dip their toes into the genre. Although it’s an older title, the stories are cute and the art doesn’t feel too dated; I think even a Catholic priest would have a hard time being offended by a shounen-ai this wholesome. They may even ask to borrow it and leave it around for the altar boys to find…you know, to get a second opinion.

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SOLFEGE (Fumi Yoshinaga)

Surprisingly, this is my first Fumi Yoshinaga title. I never actively sought out Antique Bakery although I somehow still own it, and it’s among her most well-known works (you know you’ve written a hit when it gets made into a Korean live-action movie). Though not yaoi itself, she made a lengthy catalog of yaoi doujinshi to go with it that I am going to go out on a limb and guess is probably a bit different from Maki Murakami’s Gravitation dj, but one can dream.

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RED (Sanae Rokuya)

I think I speak for everyone when I say that the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of feudal Japan is homoerotic tension. No? Ok, samurai first, but homoerotic tension is definitely second. Still no? Ugh, fine, samurai then Scientologist robot dinosaurs, jeez, making me say the obvious one. But thankfully we have unsung heroes like Rokuya here who take a period of history and add a dash of spice from their magic man love pouch to make a whole different recipe. Who can say for certain it didn’t originally taste this way, anyway? Ain’t historical fantasy great?

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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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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 she was talented, and 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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