I Thot You Was a Toad's Manga

This is the third Nagisa Furuya shounen ai I've read this evening, and although they are all very calming and natural, they are also all very much alike. The base line is friendship and personal affinity. One discovers they feel more than friendship, and they reveal themselves either accidentally or on purpose, but the other needs a bit of time to catch up. There is variety in the details, but the plot, conflict and resolution are all pretty much the same. Good stories, but rapidly becoming predictable stories.

Kai and Ren have been classmates and buddies since forever, but in their final year, Ren is in a different room and Kai, who has loved him secretly, is bereft. One day, Kai makes the classic yaoi confession-while-you-were-sleeping while Ren is not asleep, and their insouciant reactions create an emotional bomb they cannot imagine. Nagisa Furuya knows how young people think and act, and brings out the normality of falling in love, expressing it with the greatest calm and simplicity. Her drawings have the same clarity of expression. Beautiful.

Warm, wonderful and well-told story about two school boys sorting out their feelings for each other and learning to be honest.

Things are not what they seem on the surface of this story. Mic, named after a tag on a child's schoolbag stuffed with money, found at the scene where he tried to commit suicide, now lives with Neo and Bambi at the Buddhist temple, while he tries to recover his memories. Strange, haunted visions and nightmares come to him which appear to piece together the story of a terrible tragedy, involving a single mother and her preschool daughter. The question is whether Mic's role in the tragedy is innocent or not. Then there is Neo's role, whether he is capable of trust and love in the face of circumstantial evidence. A powerful and strange story in which the afterlife plays the most important role of all.

Sota and Koga's relationship didn't have an auspicious start. Sota dumped some used fishbowl water out the classroom window, inadvertantly soaking Koga and prompting the boy to make some rude remarks about his cat, who happened to sneak into Koga's house for the express purpose of killing his goldfish, a gift from someone he loved. Sota is a kindhearted boy, if not the most courageous fellow on the planet, and his attempts at atonement open some new possibilities for Koga, whose life has been more constricted than most, through no other fault than bad luck. This is a sweet and intelligent shounen ai which shows how life opens up when a person takes a few risks.

Not even partial retrograde amnesia can destroy the attraction between Fuji and Kotou, two lovers who met in school, but it causes some problems for Fuji, who doesn't identify with homosexuality. Since the start of their relationship happened during the time period that his brain injury wiped away, he struggles to come to terms with his love for Kotou, who prefers to let things transpire naturally with no prompting, no matter what the emotional cost to him. A sweet and sexy romance, which satisfies that small place of insecurity which might reside in the heart of anyone who reached out first in love.

Twins compete for academic superiority with an unusual prize at stake.

Glory hole story for people with a ravishment kink, with added incest and humiliation D/s thrown in. I would prefer it as a one-shot that ends after the first chapter, as the others never really add to the story, although there is an interesting public sex kink scene at the end. The last chapter is a separate story involving a shotacon who has the tables turned on him. The shotacon part is a real turn-off for me.

Kuju Siam presents another intricate story on Shinto themes, this time involving the Inugashi, powerful dog monads who take priests as mistresses in order to purify the souls of dogs. Aoi stumbles upon one such priest, Hakumei, and uncovers a connection to the spirit world that he never imagined, unleashing secrets and reactions from those who love and serve these supernatural beings. This is a complicated tale with a fairly realistic style of exposition which takes a little time to unstitch, but it's well-worth the effort.

A short story about time travel used to avert a tragedy. Nowhere close to the quality of Ike Reibun's Not Equal, but not an awful story either. The lack of conflict and stock supernatural plot structure takes away from the romance, and got in the way at times.