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Story
Kinukawa Yuusuke is a gay patissier and part-time piano player. Sometimes he plays in a small jazz club at night. He notices one of a group of regulars, a young yakuza guy named Fukami Hikaru glancing his way often and ends up as Fukami's private piano instructor. Friday nights he'll go there and teach Fukami piano. Slowly Yuusuke gets drawn into Fukami's dark and dangerous Yakuza lifestyle. He falls in love, but after traumatic experiences in prison Fukami has ended a homophobe. Yuusuke decides that he wants to be around him though - even if it is just to play piano for him.

Review
Negai Kanae Tamae ... had been sitting on my waiting bench for a long time and I was always reluctant to read it. For one reason it's tagged as drama and I am always afraid to read a manga that could end badly - or even just not happy. I really want happy ends. The couple can struggle, bad things can happen - no problem but I don't like it if the couple I want to be together doesn't get to be together at the end - and I am downright afraid of sad ends with dead characters and tragedy all over. Another reason that made me initially not too keen on this is that the art is not to my taste. I'm sooo glad, that I was brave enough to read it ... and to everyone who is hesitating for the same reasons - get to it!

Negai KT serves one of my favourite kinks - the disturbed personality kink. The Yakuza boss Fukami is an emotionally cold man with the cheerful disposition and social abilities of a potential mass murderer. He's cold, blunt, violent, grumpy and bad tempered - basically he ought to have been admitted to a mental institution in chapter 2. Lucky for me though that the mangaka gave him free reigns and let him act on his mental disturbance to his hearts content. Fukami has been in prison and has been raped there, which left him behind with somewhat more than the normal abhorrence of gays. He's doing drugs and using women with the same consideration that normal people give their toothbrush - my favourite type of guy actually. His character is deep enough to lose your way in the labyrinth of his heart. He's strong, he's hurt, he's scared, he's tattoed, he's beautiful - I can't help but feel for him. While occasionally there's a short scene showing Fukami alone, we are never inside his head, thus the mangaka preserves a big portion of his mysterious side throughout the story. But he's more than just the broken, cold guy, he's also cute at times, funny and can have an infectious smile. It's like underneath the messed-up Fukami there's a second Fukami who shows us what he could be. He has the potential to flip and go berserk, but he also has the potential to make it on the "good side".

Yuusuke on the other side is a gay who's out of the closet more or less. We see most of the story from his side. He is the only one who's thoughts we can read over the storyline. Apart from being gay and falling seemingly at random for a yakuza in his audience he seems pretty much your average guy - the man who lives down your road, the guy who works at the shop you visit. He's a good guy, well-meaning and has a caring, playful disposition and a likeable character. His seeming mediocrity and friendliness make it easy to connect with him or to put yourself in his shoes. Yuusuke sheds part of this averageness, he grows within the story and reveals sides to his character that he himself had not thought could be actually part of him. So he's very loyal and can be surprisingly gutsy - definitely not a weak character.

Actually the art is really not really my thing, it's mediocre, sometimes even wooden or flat and has an outdated feeling. There's one happy exception: Fukami. Fukami is a very good character - even in the design, he looks attractive and you get to understand why people feel attracted to him despite his disagreeable character. Other than that I can't really find anything good or even outstanding to say about the artwork other than that I have seen far worse and that it is very straight forward. It did not matter so much to me, it was the story and the characters that drew me in here. Nishida Higashi's mangas almost always apply to our club rules. She creates yaoi with men, her characters are strong, sometimes like here the uke is even stronger than the seme. She spins great tales of love and fate, she makes characters that can compell you ... but she isn't exactly the worlds greatest artist. I still came to love her and count her amongst my auto-read mangakas, because her stories are just too good to miss.

There's sex in Kanae NT, this is definitely yaoi - don't doubt it, even if you have to wait for it. But don't be too surprised that a lot of the sex you see in this series involves the kind between a man and a woman (or two). Fukami constantly wants to emphasize how very straight he is, he even listens to his underling Kudo's business reports while having sex with a woman and after he's finished he kindly offers her to a red-faced, sweating Kudo. There's also sex between men in NKT, some of that of the non-consensual variety. And even the gay sex between the main couple is no happy sex, but feels dark, more like an obsession, not like something they enjoy, more like an act of desperation or need. Oh ... and this is a manga were you can't be sure about who's uke and who's seme ... or if you are sure of it maybe you'll be shocked (or maybe you guessed right) ... the roles definitely don't fulfill the usual stereotypes of the genre. And Negai KT has in my opinion one of the un-girliest uke ever!

The story is dark and has painful moments, but there's lots more to it than just drama and angst. It has adventure, romance, slice-of-life ….. and even short glimpses of comedy (like Fukami in the supermarket or when he visits Sano in hospital). The plot is captivating and absolutely not foreseeable. You don't know what will happen. You don't know how the story will go or even end.

The end is slightly open to interpretation, some parts of how the story ends are not fully spelled out. Whatever way, while this is by no means a comfortable and light-hearted, pink-dyed happy-end, it's still way more positive than I had expected.

This review was written as a of the "Anti Girly Uke Yaoi Club" special read feature. Go check out the original review there and join the ensuing manga discussion.

The story
In Junior High Honami and his first love Terumi used to give each other hand jobs in a hot stuffy room at the gas station. But Terumi couldn't decide to be with Honami properly and in the end they never confessed and never even kissed. Now Honami is in love with his class mate Shouji and gets to finally enjoy a real relationship and sex life. But when he tells Shouji about his past, Shouji wants to see what his lovers' first love is like and meets Terumi. And now there's an attraction sizzling between Honami's ex-lover and his current lover. No matter what ... - in this love triangle somebody will get hurt.

The review
Enough with the serious stories, deep characters and plots that make you feel all nostalgic inside - time to get a bit more intimate here! Now that we have had the featured special read for a while I feel finally up for featuring something for the pervs here into whose ranks I include myself. Because today I give you Mukizu ja irarenee by Sadahiro Mika - the censors would like to have a field day with something like this and all our aunties would go "Oh Shocking!" while secretly trying to get a good look at some of the boycandy. So turn down your heater, get your fan ready and let's talk about hot boys engaging in unrestrained forms of bedroom combat.

The first thing to mention about Sadahiro Mika's art is that she has an enormous cast of unbelievable eyecandy. That is also really true for Mukizu ja irarenee. These boys are good looking; really sexy, toned bodies, well cut faces, firm, perfectly shaped buttocks and typical Sadahiro Mika lips that always look like freshly botoxed. She makes a point to show her boys in flattering pin-up poses too, so even if you don't fall for the story, at least your eyes will have a good time reading this. Her art is good, but it is not what you will remembering this story for.

Sadahiro Mika is a Mangaka known for steamy horizontal action, for explicit or hard yaoi that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination and wants to shock you out off your pants. And that is just how her fans like her. Her characters are primarily gorgeous hunks and all you can be sure about with their characters is that they have absolutely no moral limitations, no hesitation to taboo-breaking and never try to act against the nature of a hormonal high tide. The main cast in Mukizu ja irarenee are all 16 at the beginning of this and despite this relatively tender age have a sex life more active than some hollywood stars.

This sounds all a bit degrading maybe like the mangaka only makes a sorry excuse for drawing some porn, but I personally don't think so. I really believe she should be applauded. She is a master of the secret technique of stringing one sex scene after the other and actually telling a story this way - she even manages to develop characters and convey emotions - well nothing that will ever be mentioned in high literature discussions, but still surprising for a story that would collapse if you took the sex scenes out.

One of her ways of doing that is that her characters often talk during sex, it's either the really dirty sex language or words of love or a sentence of jealousy - she even uses the sex scenes to get a message to the reader and be it that theses two are really having some serious fun here. In Mukizu ja irarenee her other secret to convey emotions is that she lets us see inside Shouji's head and we hear his thoughts commenting every scene. This is how despite existing mostly of sex scenes all kind of feelings like angst, jealousy, despair, hurt and of course love get across to the reader. In Mukizu ja irarenee I found it surprising how much I wanted to see Shouji end up with Terumi and how much I thought that Honami was just in the way, when of course in reality he is the primary victim and all later hurt comes from his backlash against his lover and his best friend who have been getting it on with each other. I have usually better morals, I assure you, but the mangaka swept me away. Instead of thinking how tragic it was that Honami was betrayed, I ended up thinking how tragic it was for Shouji to fall for Terumi and started to make up excuses for him in my head. This partiality I believe stems from the story taking mostly place from Shouji's point of view. Somewhere in my head I was at the same time aware of the injustice of my favouring. What I really liked about this manga was the end - it had full closure without painting the future too pink. It showed that couples still argue but that it does not mean they don't love each other. Besides every one of the main cast would probably have agreed that he ended up with a "Happy End" which is not a bad achievement for a love triangle.

The plot and the characters are a lot detached from all live that doesn't have to do with the relationship of these three boys. We don't even get to see any of the families of the characters, there's exactly one tiny scene that happens at the high school and no outside characters appear that don't somehow get involved in the main plotline. Actually apart from the three main characters Shouji, Terumi and Honami there is only one other real character, Han, who gets his own little part in the story ... which with Sadahiro Mika means of course that he gets to exchange some body fluids somewhere along the plotline. Every other figure in the story who makes a split-second appearance is just a name-less part of the scenery. This detachment from outside "normal" life lets the story appear less realistic, but I guess that realism was probably never what the author intended for. I believe she wants to create entertainment and if watching hot boys having uninhibited sex is your kind of thing even without the literature award and critic acclaims than you should really give her stories a try.

Story:
Asahina-sensei is far from the ideal teacher - he comes to class drunk and sleeps around. But one time he chooses the wrong love hotel and is filmed "in the act". And now that video has come into the hands of his student, the extremely self-assured, good looking and rumoured to be gay Yuasa. Yuasa has been in love with his English teacher since the first day in class - when he sees a video of Asahina with a woman that shows the teacher unable to reach climax without having his backside played with, Yuasa suspects that Asahina may not be as insusceptible to trying ... sex with a man as priorly expected. Yuasa sets out on a journey to win his love through black-mailed sex.
A new life on the other side of the alley of love unfolds for Asahina, the English teacher. He's enjoying the ride, but there's things nagging him ... like an urge to try sex with another man than Yuasa, for example the hottie Kagami, one of Yuasa's friends. And Yuasa finds out that his friend Nagai has been in love with him for a long time. There's many factors trying to destroy the fragile relationship that starts to grow between Yuasa and his teacher.

Review:
When you read the plot you may think you know how this story will unfold. But don't be too sure, because Takaido Akemi does not coddle her readers in safety. The title is also deceiving implying some sweet love story with a prince-like hero. Instead this three volume yaoi manga is best described as "slice of life". There's some comedy, there's also some bitter feelings coming up like jealousy or regret, and the story unfolds slowly at its own pace and takes a few unexpected turns.

This was a manga that seemed inconspicuous at first but kept me thinking about the plot and the characters even a while after I had read it. Considering the number of yaoi stories I read, that is quite an achievement - sometimes there are stories where I can barely remember what they were about two days after I'm finished with them. This was definitely different and stayed in my mind for a long while - maybe because it is a story that does not go down smoothly and caused me some "mental hick-ups". Or maybe because in a love square like that it is predestined that not everyone can have a pink-died happy end. Whatever the reason, I think Prince Charming is certainly a series which stands out. The characters are unique - especially as they are often not "nice". No goody-two-shoes here! If you like to get emotionally attached to a manga character, then "Prince Charming" with its cast of 4 main characters, offers a really good selection to choose from: you could fall for Asahina-sensei who is the epitome of an irresponsible teacher, for Yuasa who is the stand-in for all people who are so stupidly in love that they lose their brains but gain lots of endurance, or for the earnest, quiet, suffering and "deep" Nagai or for Kagami (my personal favourite) whose sluttiness is covering a longing for real love.
On the downside sometimes the characters are not real. The 3 gay friends are very mature for high school boys, Asahina is at the beginning such a horrible teacher that I doubt any school would employ him for long. And teacher and students look much the same age - apart from the way they dress.

Takaido Akemi's art is easily recognizable. At first I must admit that I did not like it much. Her profile views of faces are sometimes off, and she always seems to have a character with a horrible pot-like hairstyle in her stories. But her art has grown a lot on me and today I even like it - a lot sometimes. It definitely has its own merits and I will no longer argue her artistic capabilities. In fact I have learned to really appreciate it and really think that she deserves to be better known. Still, the art is not what makes Prince Charming an insider recommendation - it's the characters and the story. This is typical for underrated yaoi manga artist Takaido Akemi - whether you like her art or not - it's usually the outstanding characters and the stories she tells that draw you in.
The English translation (from Juné) bears an explicit content warning and is labeled "M" like for mature audiences of 18+. There is certainly some things going on here, but if you've been reading yaoi for a while you'll probably agree with me that it is not really explicit. But because of the debauched characters and because a few taboos get trampled along the way the story has a slightly perverted feeling to it even without especially explicit art. I'd say it is somewhere at the border between soft yaoi and average yaoi. There's a few sex scenes, mostly just outlines of the couple, once or twice the faintest hint of genitalia is visible.

(This review was written as a featured series spotlight for the Anti Girly Uke yaoi club, you are invited to come and join our club discussion on this manga!)

Story:
By accident one night Chiaki and his stepfather with whom he has a masochistic affair are witnessed by Chiaki's schoolmate Eiji. Chiaki feels guilty about having caused an accident that killed his real father. As a result he finds comfort in cutting himself and sleeping with his sadistic stepfather, trying to cover the feeling of one pain with another. Chiaki sees a like mind in Eiji who is hiding a secret past so dark it even surpasses Chiaki's and has problems that make Chiakis comfort in pain appear minor. Eiji who is haunted by his own terrible past cannot become close to people. Fate throws ... these two high school seniors together giving them a chance to work out and overcome their problems ... and grow up in the process.

Review:
The characters of this story are both disturbed boys haunted by something that happened in their past. They are like minds in some ways, but they both have enough of their own to not make them appear too similar or clichéd. They deal with their problems in very different ways, Chiaki by willful rebellion, Eiji by keeping distance.
The plot develops fast enough that the interest in reading further never really ceases. It's still slow enough to give background to the characters and not leave the reader behind without understanding reactions or feelings - the tempo is perfect that way.
I can't fully explain the art of Kawai Touko. One moment it seems like it's only just around average, not without talent but almost a bit sloppy as if drawn under time pressure and then in the next picture it is totally amazing and missing absolutely nothing. She has especially done some very nice close-ups of Eijis face. Her faces look usually very sensitive. Altogether I think her art style works very well with this kind of dark story with lots of emotions in it. And whatever you think of Kawai Touko's art style, she really at least has one of her own.
A short note to the sex - Chiaki is a sexually very active boy. Eiji is not at first, but get's drawn in by Chiaki. Despite that I have definitely seen more kinky or explicit sex scenes. The sex in this story is not the main topic, so it makes sense that the artist shows the characters engaging in some bedroom activities, as would be expected of boys in their late teens and also because of Chiaki's character and problems. But the main theme of this manga is not the sex, it isn't the romantic love either - even if that romantic element is definitely there as well. Surely the main thing is the problems both have at the beginning and how they grow by being together and how they strife to come to terms with their past.
What makes "Cut" so unique is not Kawai Touko's art but the story she tells and the depth of the characters she creates. These boys don't come from any mould, despite or maybe even because of their tragic background, their flawed characters and imperfectness they seem lifelike and realistic. It is amazing how the (sadly deceased) author manages to convey feelings. So for example only once in the story does Chiaki tell Eiji that he "likes" him in such words and Eiji in response never even says so much but just touches him. There is no flowery sweet nothings of love. But there is no doubt how much these two boys mean to each other. None of them would manage to overcome his own share of shitload without the other.
I was put off at first that this is tagged as drama as I usually prefer much lighter stories. It is certainly not tagged wrongly, but I hope without spoiling too much of the plot line I can say, that it is not one of these hopeless stories that end in desperation with everyone dead, so don't be afraid of the drama in it.
I strongly recommend CUT to every yaoi lover. This is yaoi that has a real story, not just a meaningless stringing of sex scenes in a silly plot about people that seem from another world. CUT is actually more than just yaoi: it is the story about facing one's problems or one's past and accepting who we are. It's a key character story about growing up - and the one aspect of this story that has the most impact is that we are stronger together than alone.
(This review was done as a featured series spotlight for the Anti Girly Uke yaoi club, you are invited to come and join our club discussion on this manga!)