Mukizu ja Irarenee

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I read a lot of yaoi manga, and this is one of the best! It reads more like a Korean manwha with serious characters and themes, sad and upsetting twists and turns. Kind of reminds me of the excellent "Let Dai," though shorter and with no gang rape or suicide (thank goodness!). It might be because of the narration by the MC that reminds me of he brutally sad Let Dai.

The art is so beautiful and fluid. I like how the characters were drawn, though it does seem dated in some places (mostly facial expressions). However, I can get past that because of the ... good story line and the complex characters.

This is not a comedy. Not some school slice of life, though the boys are in high school. There is LOT of cheating going on throughout this manga, but unlike another reviewer here, I thought it was essential to the story, not some cheap plot device. There is also some violence, but nothing gruesome, just rowdy teenage boys fighting on occasion. Overall, an excellent story with strong characters. Side note... I usually jump to another manga after finishing one, but with this I somehow felt compelled to read it again and again - three times in fact! Yes, I liked it that much.

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.

I usually try to avoid commenting on yaoi, smut because of it's quality (by nature), but this manga was absolutely tactless. Because it is pornographic content, some infidelity is fair, and should be expected. But it seems to me that infidelity is the only tool used in the entire plot. I found absolutely no redeeming qualities in the manga whatsoever. If nothing else, it definitely showed homosexuality in an extremely poor light.