I Thot You Was a Toad's manga / #Beautiful Art(114)

High school photographer, Arata snaps action pictures of (mainly) Shoutarou and his basketball club teammates and sells the pictures to young women, who confess without success to Shoutarou. The two young men come to a slow realization about mutual attraction. I usually like Hayakawa Nojiko's manga, but this time I found the pacing very choppy and disjointed. I love her watercolours, but the fractured jumpiness, and sparsity of storytelling elements and background detail pushed me out too often this time.

Moriya cannot be emotionally honest, even though he needs to depend on that if he wants to attract attention from Sahara, the karate specialist who was once fond of his protegé before he was swept off by another dude. So Moriya pretends he's playing around when he tries to seduce Sahara, and then he wonders why it hurts so much.

Hotaro, a self-absorbed graphic designer, is roped into cleaning up his scruffy nerd of a boss, Honjou, so he will be more presentable for matchmaking. He certainly doesn't expect to fall for him, but once he does, Honjou's personal integrity about love and commitment doesn't suit Hotaro, who prefers to keep things casual. Fate and a fresh rival push the issue. Will Hotaro change, or lose Honjou forever? Followed up with a sexy extra. Three other lighter-than-air short stories deal with men who are reluctant to enter relationships even though they are attracted to their lovers, all rendered with Takatsuki Noboru's gorgeous line drawings.

Stories about gay pick ups and the desire for intimacy to extend beyond the physical. (1) An actor has been thrown onto the street by a former friend who wants him to start being serious about a career, only to be picked up by a restaurant owner with a spare room and a customer who thinks the actor is just his type. (2) The actor has an identical twin brother who happens to be a hairstylist and has just moved to town. (3) Two salarymen from the same company seem to be on the same wavelength until an evening of hot sex backfires. (4) The couple from the second story resolve some more issues. (5) A man who was traumatized in middle school for being gay, is so fragmented, he retreats into the persona of a child until he finds someone who returns his love.

Drunkard party animal, Yonomori, is always troubling his neighbour and fellow art college student, Hinohara, who reacts by treating him between extremes of coldness and tenderness. Only Yonomori is perplexed by this, because he harbours the Feels for him. Now Hinohara wants him to model for a sculpture ... in the buff, which brings up the next point. So far, a lively and well-drawn, if somewhat conventional, yaoi tale.

A beautiful and realistic slow-paced story about Kido Yuusuke, a young gay man fresh off recent heartbreak, who tries to play it cool with the casual dating scene, but has the misfortune of "Grindr-ing" Kamiyama Kouki, whose own tragic past has made him a kind and considerate lover beyond the norm. What else can Yuusuke do except fall for him in a big way? But does the older Kouki even want those feelings from such a young and untested partner? The second story is also a sweet one about a gay man, with a history of being exploited by closeted homosexuals, who becomes flatmate with a straight man. Asou Mitsuaki's soft and very beautifully drawn pictures have a quality about them that reminds me of 19th-century European engravings.

Nagai, a detective with the organized crime unit of the police force, suddenly acquires a roommate in his feckless former schoolmate, Kitihara, just as he cracks a bank book fraud ring. Kitihara comes and goes, building up anticipation and longing in Nagai, but he is full of secrets and some of them don't look very savoury. It will be interesting to see if Norikazu Akira takes this into suspense thriller territory, not just police procedural with a side of fluff.

Sakisaka, a gay salesman, cannot make up his mind whether to treat his touchy-feely mentor at work, Toujou, as a love interest or a rival, and Toujou persists in sending him very sly and scheming mixed messages. Since this is yaoi, which has foregone conclusions, I expect Toujou will end up every bit as crazy over Sakisaka as he hopes; it's just a question of how unpredictable or original the journey to that foregone conclusion will be. So far, with Toujou's wild marshaling and maneuvering, it looks promising.

Lacklustre start, but this story deepens and improves as it moves forward, beyond the old trope of a cocky, young, gay actor who exchanges sexual favours for prize roles. While fishing for producers, Kyousuke meets someone who appears to be a lowly crew member and shouldn't have so much charisma, but turns out to be more than a match. Soon the fragile threads holding Kyousuke's self-confidence unravel as a suppressed trauma from his past resurfaces along with the actor who caused it.