I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #psychological(9)

I enjoy this manga, but Shirotani is so vulnerable, I hold my breath during every new installment of the serial, as though he would shatter into a million pieces and blow away. I also have to chill and let the transference triggers roll off because—hey! fantasy. I do hope it isn't the sort of 'psychological' story that leaves him even worse off than when the story started. Is that too much to ask?

Wow, the first story is so rough, it's almost impossible to get past. The first time I tried, I got stuck on the strangulation scene and shut it all down. Fortunately, the story changed tack after that. The second story is relatively sweet in comparison, involving a very kindhearted transvestite and a "stray cat" boy he picks up.

During a drunken spree, failed novelist, Yuu, meets up with the Chris and gets "married" to him, symbolized by tattooed rings. Chris has been broken down with tragedy and suffers from bipolar personality disorder, which he masks with prostitution and drug use, but Yuu is swept up in his mania and has a tragic secret of his own. Will these two be able to heal each other? Hina Garasu's artwork is beautiful, adding more power and poignancy to the ending.

Shinichi, a one-hit wonder of a former pop-idol, comes crashing against his disappointed and unfulfilled dreams, just at the point where he reunites with Chikara, an overbearing and caustic junior whose feelings he once played around with, and who he abandoned to have a go as a musician. Ai no, Uta is a sad and bitter story about artists and the free market, and about being both unsupportive and unsupportable as a person. Shinichi's ego is something to behold, but I don't necessarily agree with Chikara that he should abandon his music, either, since it's wrapped up with his soul. It doesn't seem like Shinichi's reunion with Chikara is a stroke of luck, either, although it correlates with the walloping message that the universe is sending to him about what everyone thinks about his musical skill. Chikara is extreme, and while it isn't his job to suckle Shinichi's ego, his determination to crush his dreams borders on abusive. The brother drops hints about mental-emotional illness. In any case, the story ends without resolution beyond Shinichi's epiphany of self-realization and, at the same time, self-loathing, and sometimes, that's all there is to a story. It's a good story, but there isn't an ounce of comfort or kindness in it — kind of like, both, Shinichi and Chikara. One can imagine they might learn something from that ... or not.

A heart transplant imbeds violent compulsions, foreign desires, and fragmented, very tragic memories belonging to the donor within the personality of a schoolboy. He believes and behaves as though he going mad in this supernatural thriller.

An unlikely friendship develops between a schoolboy and the class misfit, after the schoolboy glimpses him giving a blowjob to a teacher in the phys-ed supply shed.

Inspired by ante-WWII western domestic architecture and gardens, Kinoshita Keiko daydreamed up a story about Yukiyo, the gay man who inherited one such home, where he lives with Takashina, his lover, and Yuuta, the son of his ex-wife and the man he once loved, who suffered from depression and commit suicide many years previously. Filled with remorse for confessing to his late friend, and muddled by disappointment and unresolved grief, Yukiya swings wildly between seducing and rejecting Takashina. Things remain in stasis until Yuuta makes a confession of his own, summoning Yukiya's protective instincts. A slow building emotional simmer with some very beautiful watercolour drawings.