There's not too much to say about the plot if I don't want to spoiler everything.
Kirishia Otoji searches for his brother, who's a private detective and disappeared.
Aizome Jou is a young prostitute known as "Hustler Joe" who has connections to the yakuza and knows something about Otoji's brother.
Two headstrong, stubborn boys meet but one of them is innocent, the other is everything but that.
The character developement's most interesting and fascinating part to me was the process as Otoji loses his innocence, physically and mentally too. First his beliefs about his brother are destroyed. Then in his grief his morals, too. As he falls in love he does not beccome the typical 17 year old in love, he becomes the obsessed, posessive lover of a likewise obsessive and posessive boy from the same age. And this kind of love is the reason I absolutely worship Sadahiro Mika: love at its fullest, maddest, most passionate and insane peak. When there's nothing else to fear but losing the other. When your own life doesn't matter anymore.
Joe is wounded and is probably having an incestous relationship with his own father. If Nedu is his father, which nobody actually knows. Joe is someone who wants to be loved but is afraid he would be betrayed. He has no morals, yet still a 17 years old kid in a love that is almost insane, it's so passionate. Joe hates to lose but has a rather interesting and practical views on who to call a winner or a loser. He is the wild horse from the cliche whom nobody can tame. Yet the manga's most beautiful moments arre those when his hidden tenderness surfaces.
I enjoyed it so much that I've read it three times in a row because I just couldn't get enough. A true masterwork from Sadahiro.
I'm not digging her artwork that much but there are scenes and pictures htat will stay forever between my favourites. Hai to Diamond is an earlier work of hers and it shows. But the trademark cocky, defiant smirks are already here, the passionate, bold sex scenes too.
Those who have enough of the stereotypical uke-seme relationships, read this manga. If you have enough of cliche love stories, this is what you want, too. If you are not afraid of rape, incest, S&M and violence, you're at the right place.
