I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #college(26)

A young man works for a mycologist in the forests of Japan, studying fungi and mushrooms. Slowly, as the scientist opens his eyes to this new world and its astonishing beauty, the young man comes to love him. A schoolboy has an astonishing gift of inner sight which reveals a secret side of life when people go to sleep. A young man strikes up a friendship with a fox spirit. Aoi Aki's artwork is superb. The stories move at a gentle and realistic pace. The relationships are natural and unforced. I love this manga! It is one of my absolute favourites.

Kamon Saeko makes sex fetishes seem sexy as hell — in this case, cross-dressing. Honda has no lack of casual sex partners, but he continues to demand time from his former swim-team senpai, Momotani, who's fed up, for his own secret reasons, with Honda's fooling around, and wants to stop visiting. The pair get drunk, go for a last swim together in the pool, and Momo ends up wearing the only swimsuit available, a woman's athletic one-piece ...

The artwork for this manga is gorgeous and delicate, as are the stories, although their threads are so subtle and character-centric, they can be a bit tricky to follow, all interconnected by a common character or precipitating event in common. (1) Sunose, a straight university student falls for his cat-like and uncommunicative gay professor, Yukimura, who is too bashful and insecure to admit the love is mutual, even after a frank conversation behind closed doors with former lover, Kitakami, reveals Yukimura's true feeling and is overheard by his beloved, Sunose; (2) Backstory: it seems that Kitakami, a renowned painter, makes a habit of revealing, too intimately, the inner souls of his models, who usually also become his lovers, just as he paints their nude bodies too explicitly. Although the hitherto heterosexual, Yukimura, is forewarned of this propensity, he throws caution to the wind and agrees to be both Kitakama's model and lover, although he refuses to promise his heart or his fidelity. (3) Seiji, Akira's stepbrother, invites himself into Akira's workplace, a mahjong gambling parlour, to coax him into returning home, unleashing a storm of feelings that Akira has never been able to resolve about being abandoned, first, by his mother and, then, by his lover. A small cameo by Kitakami, in high school, links this story to Yukimura's. (5) Sarashima Satoshi, Akira's co-worker, also happens to be his roommate. He is blessed with above-average intuition and discovers, through the slightest sign, one of which Akira cannot possibly be aware, that Akira is depressed because he was abandoned by someone with whom he once regularly slept. The main plot engines are driven by abandonment, loneliness, recklessness or subconscious signals which reveal too much, followed by feelings of being overexposed and too vulnerable, withdrawals, inadequate communication and misunderstandings. One of my favourites!

A sequel to Ringo ni Hachimitsu (http://www.mangago.com/read-manga/ringo_ni_hachimitsu/) Hideyoshiko's story continues of the courtship and early relationship between Natsuke and Komano two gay college men. Natsuke has always known he was gay, and Komano is a heterosexual who is only gay for Natsuke. It shows their insecurities, particularly Natsuke's, who was badly used by selfish and closeted lovers, and interactions. Hideyoshiko's stories are quiet and calm, with nothing extreme ever happening, but they work like a slow boil to passion.

College student, Shousuke, comforts his childhood friend, Tomoki, every time he gets dumped by a new girlfriend. Tomoki never realizes that Shousuke is suppressing his true feelings for the sake of their friendship. This is the story of what happens when these feelings build up too much. Ichikawa Kei's art has a rough beauty which makes these characters and this story quite charming. The first chapter "The Day They Became Lovers" is hilarious, or would be if it weren't also touching and real in a slightly overblown way.

The relationships which have been established in Nakamura's Doukyuusei yaoi romance series continue through college.

Taichi, impoverished, underemployed and hungry, falls onto Kouhei, a deaf boy with great homemade obento, who's looking for a note-taker to help him understand his college classes. Slowly, they come to respect and like each other, but with a disability like hearing loss, misunderstandings arise, and Kouhei has slipped into isolation and loneliness all too easily. Will Taichi be able to pull him back into a spirited life?

Volume 6: Mujihi na Otoko "Merciless Man" in Sakuragi Mei's Warui Series. Isolated at college by rumours of his invincible homosexual magnetism, Nanao Shirahane is irresistibly drawn to Kuon Aikawa, another student whose nature is to fiercely attach to a partner and who, thus, despises Nanao, even when he starts to notice that Nanao's behaviour doesn't correspond with the person he is said to be. Mix in a professor who uses Nanao's loneliness, the result of those rumours, to advance his own agenda and you have a lively, and surprisingly emotionally wrenching story by Sakuragai Mei — definitely the best of her Warui series.

College classmates, Ozawa and Yasunao, befriend each other over a shared love of classical music, and soon that friendship turns sexual. But Ozawa has a tragedy in his past that consumes him with guilt, regrets and grief, and he won't allow his relationship with Yasunao to move forward. This is the story of how Yasunao slowly breaks through that wall, rendered in Asou Kai's lovely drawings.