"Maybe I've endured everything so far just to cross paths with this person..."
While the prose was beautifully written, with the story having so many sentences that jumped out at me as something you could easily imagine posted onto a pretty photo or grunge picture and posted on Tumblr, the way those sentences came together to form a story was just incredibly poor.
Having been framed for the rape and murder of a six-year-old child, Ichiro Akitaka has lost everything. No longer a priest and having to constantly go from job to job due to his supposed past routinely coming around to the ears of his coworkers, Ichiro can only imagine one thing to do: kill himself. He happens to drunkenly find a beach, and decides there and then would finally be the time he hangs himself. With the noose around his neck, constricting around his throat, he thinks this is the end—except someone ends up saving him just in time, a priest by the name of Kyosuke Kiba.
Instantly, Ichiro grows attached to Kyosuke. He doesn't know him for long and yet feels this overwhelming warmth from him; Kyosuke is what offers him salvation, he is the one person in the world who still sees him for the person he is, not the monster he's painted as.
However, it turns out Kyosuke isn't a stranger.
Kyosuke is the man who framed him.
I personally find that to be an incredibly strong premise, and when put on paper, the entire story sounds like something that could've been incredibly strong. It had so much potential to be a great slow burn psychological story but it ultimately just couldn't live up to said potential because the biggest flaw this story had was its pacing, which is in part due to its short chapter count of only six and is present almost immediately.
After Kyosuke takes him in, Ichiro trusts him basically straight off of their first interaction, and talks about him as if they have a deep connection. Kyosuke being what saves him from falling into the deepest end is something that has an almost poetic element to it I like, the story does that incredibly well—it has this ability to phrase things in a way that feels like beautiful, poetic musings . . . But after only one chapter Ichiro is saying things like "Maybe, just maybe, my life's winding path has been just to encounter this person." It's very romanticized language, which I love; in a vacuum, that quote is great . . . But that is about a man he's known for, like, two days. We haven't seen any development there for quotes like that and the supposed connection they have to feel all that authentic.
I'm also quite conflicted on my stance towards the way Ichiro gets attached to Kyosuke. On one hand, I totally understand how after being hated all the time and having to exist in constant fear of this allegation being revealed to new people he meets, he'd obviously find solace in a man like Kyosuke who says he hears him and believes him when he says he's innocent . . . But, he still lived an incredibly rough life for a while there. To constantly be barraged with people calling you a pedophile, to be stripped of your job, serve time, constantly have to move—that would jade you. Ichiro should be a jaded man. And yet he's not. I get he's desperate for the comfort of a safe space but I found his acceptance of it too quick, he didn't have any walls that needed to be torn down when realistically I feel like he would have.
Kyosuke as a character also just fucking sucks. Like to be blunt, he's fucking ass. He murdered *and then* raped a six-year-old. The story did try to redeem him, which I'm actually not against, but . . . Its tries were very low effort. It felt more focused on explaining his past, which while appreciated and shows a clear reason as to why he acted the way he had, there's a difference between focusing on his past and focusing on his character. Like, congrats I guess, we learn the child rapist got raped as a child. So what? You didn't actually develop him in any meaningful way outside of his trauma, so it unfortunately ended up feeling shlocky and like low-quality shock bait.
One thing too is that this story is structured in a way that it feels like the intention is to be a slow burn, but . . . It's just not a long enough story to actually be slow in any way. It has multiple "plot twists" and reveals, but the thing is that since there are only six chapters, there isn't any real plot established to actually twist. It plays these like huge reveals, but . . . No, they're really not. They're plot beats, not plot twists, and I thought the execution of it was really underwhelming because of it. This story would have shined if it was longer, if it could further establish mystery and some tense unsettling dread behind who Kyosuke is before revealing that he's the one who set Ichiro up. But no, it just goes from plot A to plot B to plot C every like two chapters.
To end on a positive, the art is great. Stunning, even. And as I've mentioned, and even highlighted, the prose of this story is phenomenal. The author really knows how to write in a way that is incredibly pretty. Lastly, I liked seeing a suicidal uke. We need more ukes who try killing themselves
(This is who volumes; I believe the second volume isn't out, despite the chapters being marked as volume one and volume two—there only being three chapters for a volume seems a little odd—however I have no intention of reading volume two, if it makes its way on here. Maybe if I'm bored, I guess).
